Favr.tt Brings On CEO To Raise Funding For Its Social Shopping App

Back in 2012, London and New York based Shopa launched as a “social marketplace” where users were rewarded for promoting products they like. The company raised $1.4 million from Notion Capital and Octopus. Another in the arena is Shopcade, which has raised $4 million, or Nuji which raised $2 million. There’s something about these social shopping startups that European investors like – probably because of the early access to revenue models. Now another company plans to enter a similar space.

Favr.tt is a privately funded social shopping app for consumers and – in particular – social influencers that rewards them directly with cash when others click and buy on items they’ve linked to via affiliate links. What makes it stand out is its focus on mobile, via Android and iOS apps.

It launched quietly a couple of months ago but it’s now stepping on the gas.

Today London tech startup veteran Inmaculada Martinez has joined as CEO, alongside co-founder Matthew Woolf, CTO. Prior to Favr.tt, Martinez led a number of VC-backed startups to exit, such as Escape Velocity and Jutel Visual Radio Oulu, and she was the first employee at Moo.com. She’s also worked at Goldman Sachs, Cable & Wireless, and Nokia in its heyday.

Favr.tt’s graph database matches people with products, and rewards users’ social influence with cash-back commissions. Whereas a user would have to sign up to an affiliate scheme to share an affiliate link, with Favr.tt, a user just searches for a product and Favr.tt brings them back to the affiliate link, which is linked to their account. When they share it, any sale commission is credited directly to their bank account.

The company now plans to raise further funding with a view to launching in the US, the idea being to turn social media into one big affiliate marketing marketplace, effectively turning it from a B2B proposition into a consumer-facing phenomenon.

”If you are Skimlinks your clients are big publisher sites, but for us our client is Facebook and Twitter,” Martinez tells me. “This is where our users publish the opportunities, as we are 100% user generated content.”

In the parlance of the trade, it “monetises peer-2-many” recommendations and may well amplify social influence for brands. That’s assuming it doesn’t get sullied by the usual problems with spammy affiliate marketing.

Favr.tt competes in two ways with existing businesses.

First is the “cash-back payments to consumers” model, where catalogue-style discounted outlets such as Quidco give you money back on in-store spending — but only on a store-by-store basis. There are also cash-back credit cards.

Another model is companies that might pay you a few cents when you search for a flight on a search engine with affiliate deals.

But with Favr.tt users get cash sent to their PayPal accounts from any purchase, or any purchase made by others who click their social shopping links.

This taps into users who also recommend things on social media. There are differences between all these social shopping sites, however.

“We are taking payments on shopa so it’s much more of a marketplace than the guys at favr.tt which is affiliate based,” says Peter Janes, founder and CEO of Shopa.

Favr.tt looks and sounds like a good idea, but when your Twitter and Facebook feeds get a little over-cooked with products pushed by your ‘friends’ you know whether it’s actually worked or not.

Dive Into Fates Forever, Startup Battlefield’s First MOBA Game

Hammer & Chisel Breaking the Mold in Tablet Gaming | Road to Disrupt S1:E3

When Jason Citron launched Fates Forever in the TechCrunch Disrupt SF Startup Battlefield, it was impressive but many would say they weren’t surprised. Gamers have undoubtably heard of Jason’s previous success, OpenFeint, one of the first and most significant social platforms for mobile games on iOS and Android. Basically the concept behind Xbox live for the iPhone. Not bad for a 24-year-old.

After growing the platform to support 120 million players and ultimately selling OpenFeint to Japanese mobile gaming company GREE for $104 million, Citron set his sights on tablets.

“Most great games are actually reinterpretations of existing games with a new user interface,” says Citron. Tablets are “genuinely a new way to engage with the game,” and no one was moving to create core gaming experiences on the platform.

In last year’s San Francisco Startup Battlefield, the company announced invites to its private alpha. Since then they’ve raised  $8.2 million from Benchmark Capital and on July 4 launched worldwide to an Apple editor’s choice feature. With that kind of traction, Citron assures me the company is rapidly hiring.

Check out this week’s Road To Disrupt above to get an inside look at the making of Fates Forever.

Jonathan Teo And Justin Caldbeck Raise $125 Million For Binary Capital

Former General Catalyst managing director Jonathan Teo and former Lightspeed Venture Partners managing director Justin Caldbeck have closed their first fund together. Back in March, we reported that the two had started a new investment firm named firm Binary Capital, and now they’ve raised $125 million. The two, who had previously made early investments in companies like Snapchat, Instagram, Whisper and TaskRabbit, apparently hope to use that money to write checks of about $3 million to $5 million for other consumer-facing companies.

Vinod Khosla To Speak At Disrupt SF

We’re excited to announce that Vinod Khosla will once again take the Disrupt SF stage.

The last time he was at Disrupt, Khosla dropped a bomb by saying that 70-80 percent of VCs actually add ‘negative value’ to their invested companies — and only 5 percent, or less, added anything at all.

Khosla is the founder of Khosla Ventures, a venture capital firm that focuses on funding environmentally friendly technologies in addition to the standard lot of Internet, computing, mobile and silicon technology companies.

And, as you can see from his on-stage presence at Disrupt, he’s known as a keen investor that isn’t afraid to speak his mind.

Khosla Ventures invests in a diverse range of companies, including online payments provider Stripe, the Canary smart home security system, code challenge community HackerRank, home-buying startup OpenDoor, and Uber and Lyft competitor Summon (formerly InstantCab). They’ve also taken an interest in the Star Trek-esque food scanner SCiO and on-demand grocery startup Instacart.

Khosla was a co-founder of Daisy Systems, a pioneer in electronic design automation, and founding CEO of Sun Microsystems, a multinational vendor of computers, computer software and hardware, and information technology services that Oracle bought in 2009. Before that, Khosla was a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and he continues to manage KPCB funds through KP X.

In a time when investments in biofuels is on the decline, Khosla and his VC firm remain invested in clean fuel technologies. For instance, Khosla committed to personally make a $25 million investment in KiOR, Inc. in addition to the $25 million his firm invested. They’ve also recently participated in a $15 million Series B round for BioConsortia, an agricultural biotechnology company that discovers natural microbial products, as well as a $60 million series D round for bio-ethanol company LanzaTech New Zealand.

We’re excited to see what other advice Khosla has for us at Disrupt SF 2014, and we hope you’ll join us. He joins our growing list of speakers that includes Peter Thiel, Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen and Marc Benioff.

Tickets for Disrupt are currently available for purchase, and if you’d like to help sponsor the event, sponsorship packages are available.

Anthony Domanico contributed to this article.

Beats Music Mobile App Gets Recommendation Tweaking, Verified Profiles And More

Beats Music has updated its iOS, Android and Windows Phone applications with a few new features, including a way to tune the Beats recommendation engine manually for better suggestions, a new history view for The Sentence, the Songza-like Madlibs playback engine, and Verified Badges, which add a checkmark to celebrity profiles so you know they’re the real deal.

The Beats Music app also has some player improvements that deliver better playback and general performance, as is often the case with software updates.

This is the first significant update to the music app following the announcement that Apple would be acquiring the Beats Music brand along with Beats Electronics. The changes seem to address feedback provided by users and make available some functionality that reviewers thought was potentially missing.

The app has also received the same updates across all mobile platforms, as mentioned, and not just on iOS. While the company isn’t yet officially owned by Apple and therefore probably not on any Apple product roadmap, this is potentially a promising sign for those on non-Apple hardware who are users of the service and hope to see their software updated in time with the iOS release.

Via 9to5Mac.

TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon: Get Your Tickets!

We’ve got details regarding the upcoming TechCrunch Disrupt Hackathon you’ll want to hear. You wouldn’t want to miss out on one of the greatest all-night hacking events on the planet, would you?

The Disrupt Hackathon is the all-weekend event that kicks off TechCrunch Disrupt. Starting on Saturday, September 6th at 12:30pm, hackers will have 24-hours(ish) to build a working concept, bringing it from soup to nuts to the stage. Following an all-night programming extravaganza, teams will be given exactly one minute to present their working concept in a crowded auditorium in front of the industry’s elite. In addition, to help get you up and running on the latest and greatest in tech, we’re putting together some amazing API workshops.

If you’re on the fence, here are some great reasons you should toss your hat into the ring:

Exposure. You’ve got our attention for precisely one minute. Show us what you’ve got.Time. Been waiting to build something? Now’s your chance. We’ll bring the food & Red Bull.Nerds. Lots of them. Mix and mingle and find your next start-up partners, VCs, and more.

Pier 48 (map)
Hacking will commence on Sat. Sept 6th @ 12:30pm.
Presentations will begin on Sun. Sept. 7th @ 11:00am.

We’ll be releasing tickets in batches of 250. The first batch is now available at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/hackathon-at-techcrunch-disrupt-sf-2014-tickets-12058143231

Traditionally, we’ve offered free tickets to Disrupt for competitors. This year, we’ll continue that tradition, but with a twist: Our judges will rate all presentations, and only the top 75 teams will receive tickets.

That’s all we’ve got for now. For up-to-the-date news on all things Disrupt, follow @techcrunch on Twitter.

The Most Important Factor Of Startup Success

Whenever you think of startups, you very likely think of young people brimming with ideas sitting in garages and dorm rooms and solving problems with technology. We are conditioned in a way to consider the idea even over the person who came up with it, but after listening to entrepreneurs, I’ve come to learn, it’s not about the quality of the product idea or even the founders, it’s about the team that grows with the company because if that’s not right, the nascent company probably won’t succeed.

A company is typically founded by one or a few committed people who carry their vision forward to create some kind of product: an Apple computer, Amazon.com, eBay, Facebook or Salesforce.com. All of these companies had one or more people who had the vision and the commitment to see it through to success.They all have great backstories about how they came to be (even if some of them like eBay’s PEZ dispenser story probably aren’t true.)

After that initial burst of founding energy, it takes hard work to define and articulate a vision to employees who come on board afterward. The founders have to find a way to set goals, even with the understanding that the target is always going to be moving and they have adjust as they go along.

Susie Kim Riley, a serial entrepreneur who has started several successful companies says forming the right core team is absolutely crucial. At a talk at the Boston TechJam last month, she likened it to a military operation. “My colleagues would be jet lagged, food deprived, sleep deprived –and they would have a meeting. You have to perform,” she says

“Imagine you’re a marine. Be on top of your game. You’re on a mission and a lot of times it’s like a battle, but with the right team and the right beliefs you are going to get through it,” she said.

Uwe Horstmann, co-founder and managing director at Project A Ventures in Berlin says finding the right people beyond that core founder group is even more crucial because it’s one thing to form that core team, but it’s another to begin to articulate a vision to newer people as they join the company. “One of the core qualities that we look for in founders is his ability to articulate and communicate a vision for the company well. It sounds trivial, but it really isn’t,” he said.

He added, “It requires a lot of empathy to take a step back and think through how this closely knit culture might feel to someone who just joined. There’s always an inner circle, the first employees, highest up in the food chain, closest to the founders, who are well-informed and on board, but you really want to have everyone involved, engaged and fired up to maximize output –and to create a great place to work,” Horstmann explained.

Kristina Prokop, a co-founder at Berlin startup, Eyeota, one of the companies being funded by Project A explained her 4-year-old company is up to 20 people right now, and they are in the process of hiring more employees. As part of that process, she and her fellow co-founders are meeting to define the mission of their company, so these new employees can clearly understand and execute it.

“This is a serious thing. This is what we are figuring out: communicating and creating a vision and putting down on paper the vision we are going  to communicate to employees,” she said.

Tim Wegner, a co-founder at Project A startup Minodes says the founding members have to come to an agreement and present a united front to employees. “We have different discussion around the founder’s team and how you behave around employees. It’s important to get along and have strong discussions around where vision is going to go.”

Andy Miller, another Boston TechJam speaker, and a serial entrepreneur who sold his startup CardStar, Inc to Constant Contact in January 2012, likens new startup employees to a roller coaster ride because as he points out, starting a company is in fact a wild ride and being part of that, especially at the beginning takes individuals who are at least partly risk takers.

“As entrepreneurs when we start a company, it’s the wildest ride of our lives. When you are putting a team together, they are getting on that ride. How do you recognize people on your team. What are their triggers and how do you manage them,” he asked.

He offers some concrete help saying transparency is absolutely the key. You have to be honest with your employees about what’s happening. Secondly, he says focus on that team and alignment of people and finally empower your team to drive your company’s success.

He even offered a formula to help define that: People + Execution = Success.

He added that conversely if you have a toxic team it’s going to undermine your mission and very likely will lead to failure.

Horstmann believes that transparency is really the key element here. “A main lesson in all of this was transparency, especially in regard to internal, sensitive information. In the past, companies tended to be overly cautious about leaks. But today, we find that founders will gain more than they’ll potentially lose when sharing results, news and data with their extended teams. People will buy in better into the vision and be more receptive to a founder who explains his plan going forward based on that information,” Horstmann explained.

Eyeota’s Prokop says her company has incorporated Google’s OKRs (objectives and key results) system to help measure how well new employees are doing against the objectives the company has defined. Her company has certain objectives broken down by quarter and the goals help define how each employee will contribute to achieving those objectives.

She says this approach is particularly useful to startups like hers because it really brings discipline to the process and forces them to define that clear vision to help produce strongly defined goals for the employees who must work to achieve them.

This is particularly challenging in an early startup environment where jobs are not always clearly defined, especially among early employees. Prokop says early employees need to be flexible around their jobs and be like baseball’s utility infielders playing a lot of positions. You have to jump in and help across a lot of departments because there is so much to be done and there is a general lack of expertise you see across departments in larger organizations..

Much like Miller from Constant Contact, Prokop says it’s important to find those right people because she says a lot of people think they want to work for a startup, but they just don’t understand what that entails. She says there are new priorities and shifting targets all the time and not everyone can handle that.

Minodes’ Wegner says the core team shouldn’t be afraid to argue about the vision and clash about what they want the company to represent, but when you’re done, present it to the employees like you mean it or you’ll foster confusion. He adds, you also have to trust them enough to give them opportunities to try new things within the framework of the larger goals of the organization –and it’s a hard line to find sometimes.

“It’s important for your team to know where they are going. If it’s not clear, employees get confused and lose track of the success factors, but at the same time, you need to give people the opportunity to try things,” he said.

Startups come and go for a lot of reasons, but a lot of good ideas fail because the founding team fails to take into consideration the people factors. It’s one thing to come up with the great idea, it’s another to pull together the right group of people to execute it. It’s not always going to be easy to do, but it’s absolutely the most likely factor that’s going to determine your startup’s success or failure.

It’s essential you get it right.

(c) Can Stock Photo

(IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

Going The Distance With A Smart Shoe Made In India

Forget Google Glass or Jawbone Up, the next wave in wearable tech might just be a smart shoe from India. The Lechal, meaning “take me along” in Hindi, has a Bluetooth enabled shoe insert that hooks up with Google Maps and buzzes to let you know which way to turn on your chosen route.

Created by Ducere Technologies Pvt, the shoe hooks up with an app that syncs with Google Maps, tracks your steps and counts your calories burned. The shoe itself can be used for jogging around town.

At this point you’re probably thinking this is some sort of high tech for runners, but the Lechal has much wider applications than that. The insert fits inside pretty much any shoe in your closet. Want to listen to tunes while driving instead of Siri navigation? The Lechal could vibrate to let you know when to turn instead. It can be used for hands-free biking, hiking, walking, tourists not wanting to look down at a map every five seconds as well.

The original idea for the shoe was actually to help the visually impaired navigate the world around them. About 90% of the world’s visually impaired live in developing countries, according to the World Health Organization. Around 20% in India alone.

As in the video below, users can also drop a pin on the map on their phone to meet up with others at a certain destination. The shoes apply haptic feedback to guide the wearer at the right turn to meet up with friends or to get wherever they need to be.

The Lechal footwear also comes with something called Smart Assist, which alerts you if your phone is not in close proximity.

It’s not actually the first smart shoe tech, but it is the first to take on navigation. Aetrex created a smart shoe to track people with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia a couple of years back, but they didn’t apply it to haptic learning, navigation or personal fitness.

The idea and design for the Lechal came from two American educated Indian engineers, Krispian Lawrence and Anirudh Sharma. Both life long friends, the two went back to India and formed Ducere in the newly formed state of Telengana in 2011. The company quickly grew to a solid 50 employees currently. The Lechal is Ducere’s first product, and is expected to retail for around $100 to $150 this September.

With Apple’s Novel Acquisition, A Chance To Reinvent The Book

Apple’s acquisition of BookLamp, a Boise, Idaho-based startup billed as a “Pandora for Books,” is a key move in the battle over the future of our printed-and-bound friends. When we combine this information with the rumors swirling around a potential smartwatch product from Apple, we can start to gaze into the future of publishing.

Well, okay, maybe not.

But these sorts of analytical tools are indeed the first step in an attempt to rebuild the concept of the book. BookLamp’s goal through its Book Genome Project was to categorize every single line of text on a host of different dimensions, from level of sexual content to the types of themes and motifs an author used in his or her writing.

Once all of that data was compiled and analyzed, the company could use its algorithm to definitively recommend an enjoyable book to read. Apple’s acquisition of the startup dovetails with similar initiatives undertaken by Amazon and its use of data flowing in from its Kindle devices. With both companies offering extensive online stores for ebooks, such technology has the potential to greatly improve the consumer shopping experience.

That is certainly interesting, but to me, the far more fundamental change that such data unlocks is around the publishing loop, not the retail one. Publishing a book today still feels antiquated, despite the incredible progress made with the internet. There isn’t the same level of immediacy with readers that is offered by other types of entertainment, nor is feedback between authors and readers particularly close.

That feedback loop is critical, because books face incredible competition from other media for our attention. It’s easy to spend the afternoon watching videos on YouTube or Netflix, or zone out listening to music from Spotify and Pandora. Using algorithms and simple user interfaces, these sites actively encourage us to move from one piece of content to the next, never giving us a reason to stop consuming.

But books have been a far harder medium to stream, and for good reason. They have many qualities that make them difficult to assemble together on a consumption platform. Each one is lengthy, creating an immediate burden on the part of the reader before even the first page is opened. And they often start slow, since exposition of a world generally leads. There is no equivalent to a seven-second video that can provide an immediate payoff in the first moments of interaction.

That’s the format as it has been in the past, but who says that the format has to remain stagnant? Let me give two imagined examples of what we could do. One option may be to borrow the old concept of serial fiction. Many of the most popular works in fiction today come from authors who pump out reams of pages. Given the nearly constant production of this material, why can’t we provide a channel so that these writers can write an on-going series in a serialized format? It’s sort of the textual equivalent of a soap opera, which is ironic since many of these popular novels are romantic or criminal.

We don’t have to stop there though. Imagine opening up an invented world to multiple writers, who could write within this common environment. Readers could follow the stories that interest them, providing them the freedom to roam within a fictional world and craft their own journey through the text. It’s sort of like fan fiction with better production values, and it has the potential to turn a staid reading experience into one far more immersive.

These changes to books don’t just have to affect fiction though. Imagine taking the same sort of nonlinear thinking to areas like textbooks or historical works. A math textbook could adapt to a reader over time, providing more or less proofs and solutions as it understood a reader’s needs. A history book could allow us to dive deeper on certain subjects that engaged us, while summarizing those that we are less interested in.

In all of these cases, we are removing the strict linear rigidity of books. That’s where the importance of data like BookLamp’s comes from. With better data informing our user interface, we no longer have to see books as static, but rather as a canvas for readers to engage with.

Frankly, that’s been the most disappointing part of all of the launched unlimited book services, whether from startups or from large companies. There has been a real hesitation to innovate around the concept of books despite the immersive nature of text. Medium does something in this direction, and to a certain degree, so does Quora. But neither startup targets fiction, or even full-length nonfiction.

Part of that hesitation certainly comes from writers, who are used to the contours of a novel or nonfiction work and are not yearning to change. One of the great values of writing books is the extensive monopoly an author has over his or her subject, and few authors want to give up that power.

While books may indeed be immersive, such control over a reader is far less pronounced in reality. Readers don’t read books for hours at a time, and they are already reading them in places less akin to solitude like the subway or office break room. Distractions are ever-present, since many of us read on devices where notifications can interrupt our experience at any time.

While some purists may hate this “immersive” or “entertaining” approach to books, we don’t need to worry that these new experiences are going to somehow eliminate great literature. Rather, we are starting to see the creation of a new modality for users, who can have the freedom to interact with text in ways that are impossible with music or videos. While there will always be a place for the linear book, we shouldn’t forget that some of the most celebrated works of literature from Dickens and Dostoevsky were written as serial fiction.

Ultimately, what I expect to see is a convergence between long-form narratives and books. The idea of length will start to erode as we build our experience based on our own goals and motivations. Maybe we want to read a thousand pages about Facebook or the Middle East, or maybe we want a much narrower engagement. Better data will allow publishers to finally be able to target both customers with the same work — changing the publishing loop forever.

While all of this may not be good for books as we have traditionally known them, we have a real opportunity to make the written word competitive again with videos and music. Rather than rueing its end, we should be embracing the bright future of books instead.

“Leonid Pasternak 001“. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Fleet Unveils An App For Late Night Rides Between Silicon Valley And San Francisco

Newcomers to Silicon Valley are often shocked at how appallingly bad the transit options between San Francisco and the rest of the region can be.

It’s a legacy of fragmented regional governance where nine different counties created at least 10 different semi-overlapping public rail and bus systems. BART was originally going to connect the entire region but two counties dropped out in the 1960s, leaving the system with partial coverage of the Bay. San Mateo County argued that a rail line operated by Southern Pacific in the 19th century was sufficient and turned it into what is now today called Caltrain, the main train route connecting San Francisco with Silicon Valley.

However, today Caltrain is standing-room during peak commute hours. Then given that weekly ridership has more than doubled since 2004, longer trains with more cars may not be enough to keep up with increased demand.

Caltrain also doesn’t operate much past midnight, leaving younger tech workers who live in the South Bay with few options to get home after going out in the city.

So we’re seeing some more entrepreneurial approaches to handling regional transit.

Fleet, a startup founded by a couple Stanford students, is the most recent attempt.

They’re offering group rides between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m when trains are scarce or when the system is closed. They have shuttles stopping about a half-dozen Caltrain stations in San Francisco, Millbrae, San Mateo, Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View and San Jose. Each car or shuttle seats between five and 15 people and the cost ranges from $6 to $18, which is much cheaper than an Uber or Lyft.

“Transit was especially hard for us at Stanford,” said co-founder Isaac Madan. “Between here and San Francisco, it’s really challenging, especially at odd hours of the day or when the Caltrain is closed. Alternatives are also fairly expensive.”

A few weeks ago, you had to call Fleet up or fill out an e-mail form on their website. But now, they’ve launched a fresh app. You request a ride, pick a stop and specify a number of riders.

They are part of a wave of startups, that are experimenting with scheduled and group transport in Uber and Lyft’s wake. Other companies include Tomo Labs, which is looking at similar routes between the city and South Bay but at commute hours. There are also bus companies like Leap Transit and Chariot that are handling group routes within San Francisco.

Fleet is part of the Alchemist Accelerator.

Pogoseat Raises $2.3 Million To Offer Discounted Seat Upgrades At Sporting Events

Los Angeles-based Pogoseat has built a mobile app that enables fans who attend sporting events to instantly upgrade their seats or purchase a number of different in-game experiences. Now the company is looking to expand, thanks to $2.3 million in seed funding from a wide range of investors.

Pogoseat began by offering a simple way to allow sports fans who show up to an event to improve their view of the action by purchasing seat upgrades through its own app, or through the apps of its partners. Fans could purchase upgrades the day of a game, or even during the middle of a game, and get seats closer to the field.

That enabled sports franchises to incremental revenue to be collected for seats that were otherwise unsold or no one was sitting in. Launching with the Golden State Warriors, Pogoseat has signed up a number of clients that use its tools to make more money and drive loyalty among their biggest fans.

In addition to the Warriors, customers include the Sacramento Kings, the San Francisco Giants, The Anaheim Ducks, the Brooklyn Nets, and the Arena Football League, all of which are using Pogoseat as a way to offer a better experience to their fans.

For them, switching seats is just one new revenue stream, as Pogoseat and partners believe there are a number of other ways that they can improve the fan experience. Whether that means booking time with a team’s mascot or making putting a message on the big screen, Pogoseat is increasingly being used to power the purchase of on-the-fly, in-game experiences.

Increasingly, franchises are offering up points systems to season ticket holders that enable fans to purchase these experiences as a loyalty reward for showing up to the games.

With that product now available, Pogoseat is not only looking to grow its number of sports clients, but it is also hoping to expand into other events. Most notably, that includes concerts and other events, where users could either upgrade their seats or pay at the event for merchandise or better event access.

To help it expand, the company has raised $2.3 million in seed funding to start making the technology more widely available to sports franchises. Investors include Structure Capital, SK Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, KDDI and Global Brain Open Innovation Fund, Jillian Manus’ Broad Strategy Fund, Tylt Lab, Universal Music Group, Kodak CEO Jeff Clarke, Joshua Schacter, Kima Ventures, XG Ventures, the owners of the Sacramento Kings, and the minority owner of the Golden State Warriors.

Blockchain Bitcoin Wallet Is Back In The Apple App Store

Since Apple pulled Bitcoin wallets from the App Store in January, cryptocurrency fans have been at once calling for the ban to be rescinded and bad-mouthing Cupertino. Now, seven months later, Apple has decided to allow Blockchain.info to publish their app, a very basic – but useful – bitcoin app that securely connects to your Blockchain.info wallet and allows you to send and receive bitcoin on the go.

“This signals a major shift for Apple — they are embracing digital currency development. It is also a pivotal moment for Bitcoin in general. This telegraphs from the world’s leading consumer technology company they are ready for Bitcoin,” said Nicolas Cary of the Blockchain team.

The app allows you to create a new wallet right on the phone or connect to your current wallet via a QR code. When you fire up the app for the first time, you’re prompted to pair your device with Blockchain.info. All of your transactions are immediately available and you can send BTC to another wallet by shooting the QR code for your recipient or keying in a wallet address.

The app is protected by a PIN that you must enter before accessing your coins.

Apple began looking more favorably at cryptocurrencies after the WWDC in June. Apple removed the apps originally due to an “unresolved issue” which, as expected, the company did not elaborate on. Blockchain.info is the first bitcoin wallet on the app store and will be adding new features including a “bitcoin map” of merchants who accept bitcoin.

Given that services like PayPal and banking apps are available on iOS, it was hard to fathom why Apple pulled the apps. To hear bitcoin fans talk about it, however, a great injustice has been reversed.

Rising Share Prices Could Ignite A New Tech Acquisition Spree

In early 2014, a number of high-profile acquisitions were locked in at prices that many found confusing. The good times are probably coming back.

Companies that compete across numerous technology strata like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook are trading near record highs — or at least, the highest prices they’ve seen in a decade.

Those same companies are all incredibly cash-rich.

The result of that combustible milieu is that we could see a new wave of big acquisitions. The logic is pretty simple: When your stock price is high, buy shit with it. The small percentage of your total shares that are actively traded are up, driving your whole valuation north. Why not use that headroom to buy toys or upstart firms that could pose a threat to your cash flows?

Investors are essentially granting you short-run paper value to use as a weapon.

A few examples will help. When Facebook bought WhatsApp in February, its shares were trading for around $68 each. Facebook traded for less than $24 per share in the summer doldrums of 2013. Its impressive run into the New Year saw its stock hit (then) all-time highs between late January and March. Facebook bought WhatsApp on February 19, and Oculus on March 25.

$21 billion in deals in just over a month, near a local maximum of its share price. Surprise.

Facebook’s shares receded as did the stock price of other technology firms as investors temporarily soured on tech stocks. Keep in mind that when Facebook’s share price declined, the cost of its acquisitions declined — when you buy something with stock, and that stock value declines, you bought it at a discount. It’s like buying something with dollars, and then watching the value of those dollars decline, while the thing you bought theoretically appreciates in value. There is a material incentive to pull the trigger on acquisitions when your company is trading at a higher share price.

Tech stocks are back up, the NASDAQ is nearly at 4,500, and IPOs of companies that have shown declining revenue are spiking.

Get ready.

In the era in which RelateIQ gets picked up by Salesforce for around $390 million, on annual recurring revenue that I’m hearing was under $5 million, things are going to be interesting.

I asked venture capitalist Jason Lemkin if the current market conditions will lead to a strong acquisition field in the short-term.  He agrees that it will. Lemkin thinks the cycle could last as long as 24 months. If he’s right, things should stay bright for quite some time.

Brad Sams, CEO of Tracour, a company still in beta that provides analytics on the share price of companies across several industries, also linked the rising share prices to aggressive purchases in a comment to TechCrunch:

With stock markets pushing all time highs across the board, companies want to use this newfound value in their shares as part of negotiating agreements. Even with cash on hand, corporations are making offers of both cash and stock for startups as it’s an easy way to acquire a company without putting a large dent on the corporate cash accounts.

When the large tech companies compete from selling cloud storage to phone hardware to music sales to consumers, every edge is worth buying so that your competition can’t do the same. That drives up prices. Fear is a great tool to push the price of an acquisition — Salesforce didn’t buy RelateIQ for its short-term revenue.

Who gets picked up? Pinterest, Box and Dropbox are obvious thoughts. Keep in mind that a purchase can be at a rich valuation, even if the dollar amount is small — big purchases at big multiples make more noise, but small companies can still exit for sums that defy logic.

Not all big-dollar acquisitions are foolish, though they can lead to pretty big writedowns. Facebook’s Instagram and WhatsApp deals now appear almost prescient, for example.

Adding to the above is the need for all platform companies constantly upping the ante on where they compete. Everyone needs analytics, we recently learned. Who knew! TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino summed up that episode:

Apple bought Testflight, Facebook bought Onavo and Twitter bought Crashlytics. If you’re a modern web company that has any interest in mobile, it pays to be deadly serious about analytics. The in-house market intelligence that a widely adopted analytics and crash-reporting package can bring you is beyond gold in the mobile era. These companies know that and they’re willing to earmark a significant chunk of change to ensure that their flow of data remains fresh and influential in their decision making. Whether those are product decisions or related to future M&A.

So there are moments when the companies will run in a pack. But each platform company has unique DNA, making its potential purchase list different. Google wouldn’t buy Beats, Apple wouldn’t pour money into Uber, and Microsoft wouldn’t dump money into Facebook — kidding on that last one.

All told we should see an active second half of 2014. Place your bets on who will get acquired and for how much in the comments.

IMAGE BY BRYCE DURBIN

Uber Gets Down To Business With New Travel Expense Tools And Concur Integration

On-demand ride-hailing service Uber has spent four years building a perfect transportation alternative to taxis and black car services in cities around the world. But until today it’s just been focused on consumer travel. Now the company is going after a huge new opportunity by changing the way business users can book and expense rides on its platform.

The company is launching a new offering, called Uber for Business, which is designed to make it easier for users to bill trips directly to their company while working. On the flip side, Uber is providing participating companies with a centralized dashboard which they can use to keep track of rides that have been expensed.

The new product is basically an acknowledgment that many consumers have been using Uber for both personal and business use cases, but their employers didn’t have a good way to manage those expenses. “Ever since we started, businesses and corporations have been asking us to design something with business in mind,” Uber SVP of business Emil Michael told me in a phone interview.

Uber for Business will provide travel managers with a dashboard for inviting employees into a shared payment account for rides made on the platform. Once invited, employees need only click a link to connect their personal Uber accounts to their company’s business account.

Once that’s done, users will be able to quickly toggle between personal and business accounts. If it’s a business ride, their Uber receipts will be automatically added to their expense reports. That cuts out a lot of hassle when it comes to filing expenses.

For travel managers, the new dashboard will provide greater visibility into ground transportation booked by employees. According to Michael, most ground transportation expensed to date consisted of some combination of travel vouchers, paper taxi receipts, credit card taxi receipts, and no receipts. Uber will change that by providing more data and analytics for measuring spend across an organization.

But most importantly, accepting Uber will most likely mean saving money. In most markets, at least in the U.S., Uber is priced below the cost of a taxi, making it a more affordable alternative for getting around.

Even if employers don’t explicitly opt-in to Uber for Business, the company is still making it easy for many business users to expense their trips. That’s because Uber has announced a partnership with business travel and expense management company Concur. That integration will allow any of the 25 million Concur users around the world to link their accounts and automatically send Uber receipts to their expense reports.

In addition to all that, users who have American Express corporate cards will get the same membership rewards benefits as personal cardholders. Building on a partnership that Uber announced with AmEx earlier this summer, corporate cardholders will be able to earn double points on Uber rides and pay for Uber travel in the same way that personal AmEx cardholders can.

Targeting business travelers seems to be all the rage these days among startups. After all, it was just a few hours ago that Airbnb announced its own partnership with Concur to simplify the process of booking and expensing stays on its platform.

With those moves, Uber is going after a potential tens of billions of dollars in travel expenditures, according to Michael. By positioning itself not just as one option accepted by travel managers, but the preferred option, Uber could see a huge increase in rides by business travelers.

IMAGE BY EyeEm

Senate Expected To Unveil Broad NSA Reform Bill Tomorrow

U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy is expected to introduce a version of the USA FREEDOM Act (UFA) tomorrow that is far stronger than what the enfeebled House of Representatives managed to pass earlier this year.

According to the New York Times, the bill not only curtails the bulk surveillance of American’s call metadata — the first NSA program detailed by the Edward Snowden leaks — but would also reform the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to include an opposition voice to the government’s arguments, and force some form of public disclosure of information regarding the court’s decisions.

It also contracts the terms that the government could use to request call metadata from telephone companies.

Given the Times’ summary, it doesn’t appear that the bill would close so-called “backdoor” searches of Americans’ communications. Backdoor searches have come under withering scrutiny due to the use of such techniques by several United States intelligence agencies.

The full text will be the real test, of course, but it does seem that what Leahy has put together is stronger than the bill that the house passed. That bill was infamously shoved through in a hurry, after being so weakened that around half of its original co-sponsors voted against it. What the House passed cannot be called reform.

The proposed Senate bill would at least close the door on the telephony metadata program, but it will be important to look into its ability to more broadly end bulk collection of data relating to the communications of American citizens. The NSA has a wide, diverse set of surveillance tools that range from demanding data from Internet companies through PRISM, to tapping the fiber cables that make up the Internet itself. Merely ending the NSA’s pooling of our call records is not enough — by far — when it comes to shuttering overly intrusive surveillance programs that we currently fund.

The Times’ dismount is worth a moment of meditation:

Over all, the bill represents a breakthrough in the struggle against the growth of government surveillance power. The Senate should pass it without further dilution, putting pressure on the House to do the same.

That’s a mildly sobering reminder that even if the Senate manages to pass something that would have material impact on the NSA, it would only have cleared one chamber. The Senate bill has been put together in collaboration with the executive branch, implying that friction in the House could be less than we might expect. I’ve heard that the House bill was drastically impacted by the current administration’s input. We’ll have to see.

Tomorrow is  big day for potential reform. Strap in.

IMAGE BY FLICKR USER ZOE RUDISILL UNDER CC BY 2.0 LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

ClassWallet Is Bringing Classroom Money Management To A School Near You

When it comes to keeping track of money for classroom expenses, collecting cash for field trips is just the tip of the iceberg. There are several common issues that every teacher faces when it comes to money, or lack of money, in the classroom. And most stem from how it’s managed.

Today, ClassWallet is launching out of private beta to offer up a better way for teachers to collect, manage, track, and even spend discretionary money for the classroom.

ClassWallet was founded by Jamie Rosenberg, an attorney turned edtech entrepreneur. Previously he had founded the well-known Adopt A Classroom, which in the past 13 years has raised and distributed over $25M to 150,000 classrooms.

In Rosenberg’s experience, whether a teacher is raising money for supplies, collecting money for a field trip, or receiving funds from a grant or the district itself, putting the money into an appropriate account, making it accessible, and tracking it all become major pain points.

For example, last year, the Jacksonville Teacher of the Year won a $500 grant from a local education fund. In order to distribute the funds, the Foundation wrote a check to the teacher. To use the funds for her classroom, the teacher had to submit the check to her school, which in turn submitted it to the district, which deposited the money in a bank.

Now the teacher has two options: Either spend her own money and submit reimbursement, which follows the same teacher to school to district and back process; or she can request a purchase order for the supplies she would like to purchase.

What’s more, according to Rosenberg, is that legislation in education has been following a “movement among thought leaders to push decisions closer to the child.”

While this may mean students getting supplies and tools more inline with their needs, the paperwork headache is likely to get worse for teachers. The process as it stands now can take two months and cost more than a few erasers to complete.

ClassWallet was built to streamline this workflow and has a lot of useful bells and whistles built in. In the same grant scenario, the Foundation submits the check directly to the district who deposits the money into the teacher’s Class Wallet. Voila, money accessible.

From there, the teacher can purchase from vendors directly in the application. ClassWallet has partnered with Best Buy, Office Depot, Scholastic, School Specialty, Carson Delosa, and others to give teacher easy access to any and all supplies they may need.

ClassWallet also recognizes that not all purchases are made online. For offline purchase, ClassWallet enables teachers, through a partnership with MasterCard and Verifone, to move money from their ClassWallet account to a prepaid MasterCard that can be used for things like field trips.

All transactions are tracked and can easily be exported as a PDF to share with school or district administration. Teachers are able to set up fundraising campaigns, message and thank supporters from inside the platform.

ClassWallet has had 500 teachers in its invite-only beta for the past few months, and their takeaways are clear. Every teacher has the same problems, regardless of district, state, grade level, or years of experience.

One of the major challenges of edtech is selling into the education system, which is notoriously strapped for money. There are plenty of apps and tools that teachers love but districts are unable or unwilling to budget for.

ClassWallet hopes to avoid that fate by providing a service that saves significant time and money, creating a “need to have product” for the education system in the same way Clever has. The founding team’s experience and network from Adopt a Classroom should play a role as well.

ClassWallet recently joined TechStars-Kaplan accelerator and ramping up to serve the upcoming back to school season.

Tango Teases “Music Pix,” A Social App For Making Instant Photo Slideshows

Tango, the mobile messaging platform that raised a massive $280 million from Alibaba earlier this year, has quietly rolled out a new photo-sharing application called Tango Music Pix. The app lets you share your photos along with a song, in order to create 30-second customized slideshows. [UPDATED, see below.]

In the app’s description on iTunes, Tango notes that you won’t need to drag, crop or zoom your photos before sending them out – Tango Music Pix does the editing work for you. That makes the new app sound like something of a competitor to Animoto.

However, Animoto also focuses on the business crowd who want to make quick slideshows for work-related purposes – like a realtor showing off a house for sale to potential buyers, for example. But Tango Music Pix is more squarely aimed at the consumer market, as a slideshow builder that lets you quickly post to Facebook, Twitter, Tango’s flagship messaging app, or share via email.

There are several other apps that play in this general space, too, including Sharalike and Flipagram, for instance.

Music Pix is not Tango’s first effort at building standalone applications that work with its main Tango messaging app. The company follows the playbook of Asian messaging apps like LINE, which offers dozens of complementary apps that work alongside LINE, including games, as well as apps that offer other tools, stickers, cards, and more.

Tango’s app lineup today includes a variety of games, too, from racing games to cards games and even a Flappy Bird clone. However, Music Pix would be the company’s first social application to exist outside its main messaging app.

UPDATE: It seems Tango’s Music Pix was not ready for prime time. Shortly after publication, the app disappeared from the iTunes App Store where it was available as a free download.

However, if you were able to grab it before Tango pulled it out, you can still use the app to build your slideshows. One problem I had with the app during testing was that it loaded up your photo gallery from oldest to newest. That made it difficult to scroll to and select your most recent photos. The app also crashed, but that could be an iOS 8 beta bug, so your mileage may vary. In any event, it’s clear that Tango didn’t want anyone finding out about Music Pix just yet.

(hat tip: Musically.com)

Why you should take computer security seriously and as a high priority !

Let’s face it; viruses and malware aren’t disappearing any time soon.  They have become more common and increasingly advanced on every platform from Windows to Mac. Even smartphones are starting to succumb to never ending spread of malware.  Let’s go over some of the things you can do to prevent an infection and, in most cases, remove any threats successfully without much effort.

Virus Removal At A-M-S-Computers

Keep your antivirus software up to date. This is one of the most important and effective things you can do to prevent an infection and remove any malware you might have. This not only applies to the program’s detection files, but also to the program itself. Don’t have an antivirus program on your computer? Get one. There are many, many great choices to decide on. You may notice that a lot of antivirus programs now either have a free version, or are completely free. One of the key factors for this change compared to the past is the increasing amount and severity of malware. Nowadays, almost everything we interact with whether in the corporate world, at home, or on the go, involves some sort of computing process. The fact that viruses and malware have become so common necessitates the use of antivirus software. If you consider how damaging most malware can be, you may come to understand why IT professionals are very serious about protecting yourself. Protecting yourself is extremely important, but the fact that most malware is easily spread over email, networks, and websites/webservers, changes the game. If you put yourself at risk, you’re also putting anyone else on your network at risk. Even people you communicate with regularly become at risk whether it’s through social engineering based attacks or not.

Use an up-to-date web browser. This has become an incredibly big issue as of late. Older browsers are generally insecure and exploitable (as well slow, but that’s another topic). The fact that Apple’s desktop and mobile OS was exploited through Safari at a previous Pwn2Own contest says a lot. Hackers are no longer solely relying on a user installing software to become infected. Instead, a lot of recent attacks are targeted at users browsing the internet. For example, let’s say you’re using Internet Explorer 6 and you visit a site that has either become compromised unintentionally (yes, it happens all the time), or is designed to infect the user. Since you’re running an incredibly old browser, it’s more than probable that you’ll become infected. If that happens, you’re now relying on your antivirus software to either catch it in real time, or on the next scan. If you’re not using antivirus, you can guess what’ll happen. If you are, it comes down to a matter of statistics. Newer browsers implement much better security methods and are generally safer to use. Sometimes, it can even render certain malware ineffective because of the advanced security measures in place. That’s not normally the case, but it does happen if the virus or malware is old and sloppily coded.

Be smart. There are many sites out there that trick you into downloading software that is actually malware. Other sites may try to look like official legitimate sites but are actually in place to either steal your sensitive information, infect you, or both. Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace all have their share of threats as well. Sometimes you may see a post from a friend that is in broken English or just doesn’t make sense. These are usually accompanied with a link and a little closer that tries to make you click on the link. These posts are the result of socially engineered malware. They leverage the power of social networking sites along with any compromised accounts they’ve already taken control of, and attack others using the same method. You can imagine the rate of compromised accounts and malware since many people do not think about what they’re clicking on or if it’s even safe. Be smart, stay alert, and watch out for any social engineering attacks directed at you. Remember, just because your friend posted something on Facebook and you personally know him, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your friend posted it. The number of compromised accounts on social networking sites (and email providers) is staggering and always growing every day.

Those are only a couple of factors that will keep you safe from attacks. Try to think of the big picture.  If you don’t care about your computer getting infected or attacked, consider other people that come into contact with you or that computer. This can be anything from friends/family physically using the computer to communicating with you while you use that computer. Remember, almost every industry has an IT aspect to it. Things you aren’t even aware of can cause a big impact and, in most cases, can cause that impact silently. Also, be sure to consider that malware comes in more variations than you can count and has many different types as well as a wide variety of goals. 

A-M-S-Computers

6148 Ridge Rd.

Port Richey, Fl 34668

727-277-3216

www.ams-computers.com

Napster Owner Rhapsody Passes 2M Paying Users As It Extends unRadio To Europe

In 2012, Rhapsody nabbed the European assets of streaming service Napster, covering the UK and Germany, to fill out its 2011 acquisition of Napster in the U.S., as part of its strategy to square up globally to Spotify and other online music rivals. Today, it’s putting that reach to use as Rhapsody is expanding its unRadio service for the first time outside of the U.S. The news comes as Rhapsody says that it has now passed 2 million paying subscribers between its eponymous music streaming app, Napster and unRadio.

To put that number into context, Rhapsody and Napster are now available in 32 countries, and they passed 1 million subscribers way back in 2011. The company is also competing against some juggernauts. Spotify in May this year said it had 10 million paying users, with 40 million overall.

When Rhapsody launched its unRadio service — a Pandora-style curated service that’s been created in part to attract less die-hard music fans but also to market the more premium on-demand streaming service — last month, it did so in partnership with T-Mobile in the U.S. It’s following the same pattern in Europe, partnering with number-two French mobile operator SFR. (France’s leading mobile carrier, Orange, is an investor in another large competitor in the space, Deezer.)

For the French launch, the service is going under Napster Découverte (Napster Discovery), and will give users the same service options as in the original service in the U.S.: while the list is pre-selected by Napster/Rhapsody, listeners can skip as many songs as they want to, and, because they are paying €3.95, listen ad-free. Marking a song as a favorite gives users the option to listen to it again later, even offline.

“We are very satisfied with the development of Napster in France and the successful co-operation with SFR,” said Thorsten Schliesche, Napster SVP and GM for Europe, noted in a statement. “France is one of the fastest growing markets in Europe. The success of our service proves that customers are eager for a blend of on-demand and mobile data bundles.”

Rhapsody/Napster are also digging deeper in the Latin America with another European carrier deal. Telefonica Movistar, the Spanish carrier’s operation in South America, will be “actively promoting” Napster Premier in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay — an extension of a strategic partnership between the two launched last year.

All fine and well, but in a game of scale, where we are starting to see some very clear leaders, will Napster, despite its legendary, renegade brand, have what it takes to win over new users, keep margins and overall revenues strong, and maintain bargaining power with labels large and small? Right now the company says its catalogue totals some 32 million tracks, with about 80% of listening on its platform happening on mobile devices.

Photo: Flickr

Why The First YC-Backed Biotech Company May Just Be The Future Of Pharma

Gingko Bioworks sounds kind of like a mad science lab of the future. The Boston-based biotech company is currently working on a project with DARPA to treat antibiotic-resistant germs, using designer microbes to convert CO2 emissions into fuel and is somehow making yeast smell like roses.

Gingko Bioworks co-founder Jason Kelly considers these projects, and many others, the future of the pharmaceutical industry. “The designer organisms we create are solving a supply problem,” he says. “Instead of going to the agriculture industry or pharma we will eventually just use organisms.”

Kelly says this is the main reason he and his co-founders started Gingko while at MIT. The four students began discussing how inefficient it was to program microbes. It was too slow and tedious to make any real dent. It was also a good reason biotech didn’t get the kind of funding that other tech was used to. So they switched things up, added robotics and created the first organism engineering foundry. Their “organism engineers” now take DNA sequencing from nature and basically create designer microbes that can actually replace technology with biology.

The DARPA project is just one example of this. Rather than trying to come up with better antibiotics, Ginkgo Bioworks is working with DARPA to get at the root of sickness and immunity by manufacturing probiotics that specifically target and remove bacteria with harmful traits – such as antibiotics resistance – while leaving healthy bacteria intact.

It’s also, notably, the first biotech company to be backed by Y Combinator. YC president Sam Altman confirms the seed accelerator has also invested in 4 other soon to be announced biotech companies and that he’d like to see more funding in the biotech space. “We look at three things before deciding to invest in an industry – upcoming hyper growth, costs coming down to series-A scale, and cycle time coming down to something reasonable for a startup,” says Altman. All that has started to happen in biotech.

Though Altman admits YC may be a little earlier than traditional VC firms to get into the biotech space, Google Ventures, Greylock and others also seem to be making more of an investment in these types of companies.

Greylock currently lists WarpDrive Bio, Aveo and Concert Pharmaceuticals in its portfolio. GV’s managing partner, Bill Maris has also said biotech is one of “the brightest spots” to invest in. Maris was once was a biotech portfolio manager at Investor AB and is listed as one of the main brains behind Google’s Calico project. That’s a biotech pet project at Google that focuses on aging and ending death (as in we might never have to die).

Gingko Bioworks and other companies like it touch on changes rapidly coming down the line for myriad industries that affect our daily lives – from the way we create medicine and grow our food and even in cleaning up the air we breathe. This major shift in the last five years in biotech means lower costs, faster time to market, new markets and other things we have only been able to scratch the surface of.

Investors Cash Out Of Payment Technology Startups

Even as a clutch of new payment technology companies including Zooz Mobile and Plastiq announce new financing rounds today, it seems like investors are no longer paying out for payment companies.

Over the past three quarters, the number of venture-backed payments companies has declined, tumbling from 59 startups in the third quarter of 2013 to just 41 companies in the second quarter of 2014, according to CrunchBase data.

Some winners have already emerged from the scrum of payments technologies that have raised money over the past five years. Companies like Stripe, the online payments provider for small and medium-sized businesses, which raised $80 million in January from investors including Khosla Ventures; Square , the mobile payment company for small and medium-sized businesses, which closed a $100 million debt financing in April; and Klarna, the Swedish payments company that notched its own $115 million in private equity funding earlier in the year as well.

Klarna, the European juggernaut in online payments, is beginning to make moves in the U.K. and is eyeing an expansion into the U.S.

So much firepower may be keeping new platforms for jumping in, but there are also problems inherent in the payments market that have made it a difficult sector for startups to navigate, according to Khosla Ventures’ Benjamin Ling.

“Payments are a massive industry with a lot of room for innovation, but it is very hard to break through because not only do you have to get consumers, you also need merchants and often times… third parties like associations behind you to be successful,” Ling wrote in an email. “Consumers want trust and ubiquity in payments. Merchants want to know there are large numbers of consumers. For a startup none of these is usually true. The chicken and egg problem in payments is one of the hardest to break through.”

Those challenges are what make the successes of companies like Klarna, Stripe, Square, iZettle or any of the large venture-funded startups more impressive.

Meanwhile, investors like Bain Capital Ventures‘ Matthew Harris think the slowdown in funding for payments companies is a natural evolution of what had been a relatively young market.

“It basically came from nowhere if you look at the earlier quarters, and it was almost literally zero in the prior years,” wrote Harris in an email. “Payments have gone from being irrelevant in the venture landscape to being a meaningful sub-sector, but trees don’t grow to the sky… I also think there has been a shift in focus to alternative and ‘peer to peer’ lending as the hottest sector, which I think is drawing away from capital.”

MIT Students Create An Ice Cream Printer

You scream, I scream, we all transform an off-the-shelf Cuisinart soft-serve maker to extrude super-cooled and 3D-printed shells of ice cream! Three students at MIT, Kyle Hounsell, Kristine Bunker, and David Donghyun Kim, have created a homemade ice cream printer that extrudes soft serve and immediately freezes it so that it can be layered on a cooled plate.

The system is a proof-of-concept right now but they were able to print some clever shapes out of the sweet, sweet cream. Writes Bunker:

We were inspired to design this printer because we wanted to make something fun with this up and coming technology in a way that we could grab the attention of kids. We felt that it was just as important to come up with a new technology as it was to interest the younger generation in pursuing science and technology so we can continue pushing the limits of what is possible.

The team worked on the project their spring semester at MIT and got it working to print a star. They have no plans to commercialize it yet but it seems like a clever and very useful hack.

“We ate a lot of ice cream during the making the machine especially during the couple all-nighters when ice cream became our midnight snack and breakfast, it was a great project and we had a lot of fun working on it,” she said.

The team built the printer as part of Professor John Hart’s class in additive manufacturing. They used a Solidoodle printer to control the plate and the stream and froze the ice-cream as it came out with liquid nitrogen. As you can imagine, it melted quite often, resulting in a pool of sweet, edible sadness. As a man who can eat three gallons of ice cream in a sitting, I could imagine this thing just 3D printing all over my head.

Yahoo Exec Accused Of Sexual Harassment Files Defamation Counter-Suit

Prominent Yahoo executive Maria Zhang filed a defamation complaint Wednesday against a former female employee who sued her for sexual harassment and subsequent wrongful termination. In her filing, Zhang called Nan Shi’s allegations — that she forced Shi to have oral and digital sex — “outrageously false” and based in attempts to extort Yahoo.

On Friday Shi filed a suit against Zhang in a Santa Clara county court, asserting that Zhang coerced her into having sex on multiple occasions against her will. Shi claims the incidents occurred in February 2013, shortly after Zhang was hired as a principal software engineer at Yahoo and while Zhang was staying with her at her temporary Yahoo housing unit in Sunnyvale. Prior to working at Yahoo, Shi had worked for Alike, a Seattle-based startup Zhang founded and had been acquired by Yahoo.

“Zhang told [Shi] she would have a bright future at Yahoo if she had sex with her,” Shi’s complaint alleges. “She also stated she could take away everything from her including her job, stocks, and future if she did not do what she wanted.”

The lawsuit claims Zhang forced Shi “to work grueling hours and compose work emails over the weekend at the apartment, sometimes right after sex.” Shi says when she rejected Zhang’s “further advances,” Zhang downgraded her performance reviews. She also accuses Yahoo of failing to conduct a proper investigation when she reported the situation to Human Resources.

A representative for Yahoo, which is also a defendant in Shi’s suit, did not respond to a request for comment, but referred TechCrunch to a statement made to the San Jose Mercury News when Shi’s suit was first reported last week:

“As we previously stated, there is absolutely no basis or truth to the allegations against Maria Zhang. Maria is an exemplary Yahoo executive, and we intend to fight vigorously to clear her name.”

Zhang’s cross-complaint diverges from Shi’s narrative.

Zhang asserts that Shi is making “such false and outrageous allegations” for one reason — money. Shortly after starting at Yahoo, Zhang says Shi’s immediate supervisor gave her a bad performance review. Zhang then assigned her a new supervisor, but she continued to receive poor reviews. 

“By March 2014, it became obvious to Shi that her job was in serious jeopardy,” Zhang’s complaint says. “Realizing that consistent negative performance feedback would likely lead to the termination of her employment and the loss of unvested stock worth potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars, Shi attempted to save her job by making complaints to Yahoo’s Human Resources department.”

Zhang says initially, Shi did not complain of sexual harassment. According to the complaint, Shi initially complained in March 2014 Zhang was a “demanding manager and “threatening her job.” The department conducted what Zhang calls a “thorough investigation,” but found no evidence of Shi’s claims, especially because she had received poor reviews from two supervisors.

In April 2014, Shi realized her “termination of employment would likely be imminent,” according to Zhang’s complaint, and told Yahoo Human Resources that Zhang had forced her to have sex. Zhang claims that never happened, and that she never had any form of sexual relationship with Shi, whether it was forced or consensual.

Zhang futher asserts that Shi was unable to produce any evidence — witnesses, photographs, correspondence — of any sexual contact. Shi’s suit does not reference any evidence.

Shi claims that during the investigation Yahoo put her on an “unpaid leave of absence” before eventually firing her. But in her rebuttal, Zhang says during the investigation Shi was on paid administrative leave, and actually remained employed by Yahoo much longer than she otherwise would have been. Shi’s employment was officially terminated on July 11, according to Zhang.

In her counter-suit, Zhang claims Shi’s claims have damaged her personal reputation, particularly the claims of forced digital and oral sex. She is seeking damages from Shi in her counter-suit.

Coolcaesar at the English language Wikipedia [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

IMAGE BY Flickr USER David Sawyer UNDER CC by-SA 2.0 LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

Visa Launches PayPal-Like ‘Checkout’ Widget For Third-Party Websites

Visa wants to make the process of paying for goods on your phone or iPad as easy as swiping your credit or debit card at an offline retailer.

To do so, it’s adapting to Internet retail with the launch of Visa Checkout, a new payment option that will allow users to speed through the online checkout process in just a few steps.

Visa is introducing a username and password system for making payments, which would eliminate the need to enter a 16-digit credit card number.

“Merchants want to sell, they want to convert cardholders to sales,” said Sam Shrauger, Visa’s senior vice president of digital solutions, at an event announcing the launch. “People want to buy, people want to enjoy what they’re buying. What they don’t want to spend their time doing is paying.”

Visa isn’t the first to do this, of course. PayPal has offered a similar payment option for years, and more recently Amazon launched a competing payment button.

But Visa was careful to make it sound like it wasn’t competing with PayPal for these payments. CEO Charles Scharf called PayPal an “important partner” to Visa because many PayPal transactions are also paid for on Visa cards.

“We like those transactions,” he said. “But we shouldn’t have to rely on anyone else.”

Shrauger said the current arduous process often deters users from making purchases on small phone screens, with 86 percent of users abandoning shopping carts on mobile devices.

With Checkout, users simply select the Visa Checkout button on the merchandise page and enter a username password and select their card. Visa then automatically fills the payment form with their credit card and shipping information. Initially the service will be available at retailers like Neiman Marcus, Pizza Hut, Staples and United Airlines in the United States, Canada and Australia.

This isn’t the company’s first attempt at a faster online payment system. In 2011 Visa launched V.me, the company’s digital wallet. However Shrauger emphasized that Checkout differed from a wallet, offering customers a faster way to get through the checkout process rather than using a variety of payment sources like V.me.

“Customers don’t want a wallet,” Shrauger said. “They want to be able to pay and be done with the experience.”

The product launched at an event at the company’s new San Francisco headquarters, where attendees tested the service with partners the company has already acquired, like Neiman Marcus. Visa also launched a mobile SDK, which developers can implement as they build apps for iOS and Android. At the event, Visa showed how this could be implemented with a bike share app.

IMAGE BY Courtesy of Visa (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

Intel And Microsoft Hit 12- And 14-Year Highs On Strength Of Improving PC Market

We’re apparently in the pre-Post PC market.

The PC market has almost stabilized, and its re-found salubrity is helping players in the space. Intel and Microsoft both notched big gains today in the wake of Intel’s positive earnings report that came after the bell yesterday.

Intel rose 9.27 percent during regular trading, pushing its market capitalization to $172.28 billion. That’s Intel’s strongest close since the start of 2002.

The company’s $13.8 billion in revenue, and $0.55 in earnings per share were supported by its PC division posting 6 percent year-over-year revenue growth. That division generates more than half of Intel’s revenue.

Intel’s results were not too surprising — the company had previously raised its guidance, and the PC market itself had already demonstrated strength, or at least what passes for strength for the PC market.

Data for the PC market in the second quarter of this year showed either a very modest decline, 1.7 percent, or a small rise, 0.1 percent, in global PC shipments. Hardly stellar numbers, but after endless quarters in the red, the period was a welcome respite for personal computers and their progenitors.

The PC market is currently moving units at around the 300 million per-year mark, or around 822,000 per day.

Microsoft, which reports its earnings on Monday, picked up a more modest 3.84 percent in value today, closing just above the $44 mark. That’s Microsofts’ highest close since 2000. Microsoft’s gain today was partially due to Intel’s strong earnings, implying that the Redmond-based software company’s Windows division will have a strong quarter. It was also likely influenced by the rumors of impending layoffs which could ease the company’s operating expenses in the wake of absorbing tens of thousands of Nokia employees.

The PC market may not be done shrinking, it’s worth remembering. A few stronger quarters led by the Windows XP end-of-service date and perhaps a decent holiday cycle would not indicate new long-term weight in personal computer sales. So let’s not get too far ahead of a potential trend.

But it’s still an interesting day. Once more round the sun.

Samsung Launching Its Premium Headphones In The U.S.

With sales of its premium smartphones failing to live up to expectations, Samsung is moving into another potentially high-margin business: premium headphones.

Tomorrow the South Korean electronics giant will launch its Samsung Level line of headphones (and a wireless speaker) on premium goods retailer Gilt, whose members will have exclusive early access to buy a pair before they become more widely available. Dedicated Samsung fans who haven’t signed up for the site don’t need to wait long, however, as the headphones will hit Amazon on July 20th.

With prices ranging from $149 for its “Level In” in-ear buds to $349 for its wireless, noise-cancelling “Level Over” headphones, Samsung is clearly going after the same premium, design-centric market as Beats, the headphone maker Apple purchased back in May for $3 billion.

Beats has shown that the combination of good-looking hardware and well-targeted marketing can make headphones a big business. While Samsung is known for throwing huge amounts of money at marketing campaigns, its lack of distinguished design is frequently cited as the reason its Galaxy S5 is losing ground to cheaper alternatives in the smartphone space.

To make the Gilt offering more enticing, Samsung is bundling its Level On headphones and Level Box speaker for $299, a $50 discount from buying them separately. While we can’t speak for the headphones, TechCrunch reviewed the Level Box back in May and found that Samsung delivered exceptional build quality and performance compared to similar-sized offerings in its price range.

IMAGE BY Samsung (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

Xbox One Sales “More Than Double” In June, But Microsoft Doesn’t Disclose Absolute Figures

Today Microsoft announced that in June, sales of its Xbox One console “more than doubled.” It did not release a concrete sales figure for the time period, disappointingly.

Microsoft last indicated a hard sales number for the Xbox One in April. It sold 115,000 consoles that month. It isn’t clear if its sales declined in the ensuing period thus making the doubling less impressive, but either way, things are looking better for Microsoft.

What changed? Microsoft made a cheaper Xbox One package available that didn’t contain a Kinect sensor. The $100 price decline that the new bundle provided was apparently enough to get sales to grow.

The PlayStation 4, Sony’s competing next-generation console, has outsold Microsoft’s Xbox One so far. The former is available in more countries and had, until recently, a lower price. Provided that the current Xbox One sales bump isn’t fleeting, Microsoft may be able to make up some lost ground.

Thanks to Amazon, no one has to report actual sales numbers anymore! Woohoooooo news.xbox.com/2014/07/xbox-o…—
Kyle Russell (@kylebrussell) July 16, 2014

Snapchat Files Trademarks To Handle Payments

Snappay? Snapchat may try to monetize by processing peer-to-peer payments, money transfers, or online payments, according to two trademarks it filed earlier this week. Owned by Snapchat and filed on July 11th by an attorney at Cooley, which is known to be Snapchat’s law firm, the trademarks could keep anyone else from entering the same space under the Snapchat name. After being tipped off to the trademarks by a source, I’ve contacted Snapchat and am awaiting a response regarding what exactly these trademarks are about. [Update: Snapchat declined to comment.]

Laugh it up all you want about Snapchat making your money disappear, this could be serious business.

Specifically, the two trademarks are for:

“Computer application software for processing electronic payments to and from others that may be downloaded from a global computer network” – Trademark Serial # 86335306 “Electronic transfer of money for others; providing electronic processing of electronic funds transfer, ACH, credit card, debit card, electronic check and electronic, mobile and online payments” - Trademark Serial # 86335307

Until now, speculation about Snapchat’s monetization routes has focused around advertising, in-app purchases of virtual goods, and sponsorships from brands for promoting live events. These trademarks paint a different picture.

It’s not the only one that might look to earn money on messaging through money transfers. Facebook recently hired PayPal President David Marcus to head up its Messenger division.

Snapchat has done some staffing of its own on the monetization front. It hired Instagram’s head of business Emily White as COO in late 2013, and last month poached Facebook’s Global Director of its Preferred Marketing Developer program Mike Randall to be Snapchat’s VP Of Business And Marketing Partnerships.

If Snapchat does get into payments, it might allow friends to send cash back and forth, or buy things online with a credit card registered in its app, similar to Venmo. By taking a small fee on payments, it could earn money without forcing users to watch interruptive ads, buy filters, or have their experience cluttered with Our Stories from brands.

Imagine getting a flash sale Snap of a cool product from an ecommerce company. Snapchat could potentially let you pay to buy that product from within its app. The startup has also already dabbled in commerce. It provides links for users to buy from iTunes the (awesome) songs it features in its announcements of new features, like Stange Talk’s “Young Hearts” or Goldroom’s “Embrace”.

At the very least, Snapchat may have filed the trademarks to keep the option of processing payments under its name open.

Funding Circle Gets Funded, $65M More For Its Small Business Lending Marketplace

Funding Circle, an online marketplace that connects small businesses looking for loans with individuals and institutions willing to lend money, has picked up a significant round of funding of its own. The startup, founded in 2009 in London and more recently active in the U.S., has raised $65 million — money that co-founder and CEO Samir Desai tells me it will use to continue to improve its technology, as well as build out further into the U.S. and new markets, likely via acquisitions of other, regional online lending platforms.

The $65 million round getting announced today is Funding Circle’s biggest to-date and puts the total raised by the company at $123 million. It’s a Series D round and was led by Index Ventures, with participation from other existing investors, Accel Partners, Union Square Ventures and Ribbit Capital.

Why so much, and only nine months after its last, $37-million, round? “It’s a testament to the market opportunity,” Desai says. “It’s a very, very fast-growing business.” The UK business, he tells me, has been growing at 150% a year over the past four years, with the current rate of loans accelerating rapidly. Of the more than £350 million ($600 million) loan in that time, nearly £150 million was loaned out this year.

In the U.S. the business has been seeing similarly high rates of growth. Whereas Funding Circle started out 2014 lending out $300,000 per month in the U.S., in June it passed $6.5 million/month.

In total, Funding Circle is forecasting that it will loan out $600 million in 2014.

The idea behind Funding Circle is that it targets small businesses — “not startups,” Desai notes pointedly, and “not desperate businesses, just good, solid operations” that might be restaurants, pharmacies or small manufacturing firms. A typical turnover for a typical business on its platform is between $1 million and $2 million.

Funding Circle may provide interest rates similar to banks — “sometimes it’s cheaper, sometimes it’s more expensive,” Desai says simply — it does it on a vastly more efficient basis. Like other online lending platforms like Kabbage, Lending Club, and Fundera, Funding Circle has created a platform that relies heavily on technology to help make more intelligent lending decisions.

Funding Circle’s twist is that it assigns a human expert to vet each loan. Desai says that so far the formula has been working well. The company targets a loss rate of 2.3% per year, “but on average we’re seeing a loss rate of 1.8% per year.” And, in terms of the net returns, 70% of investors are seeing net returns of between 6% and 10% each year and in the U.S. above 10%.

Desai adds that even with that more analogue approach, a typical loan is turned around in a week, or faster if necessary. (A bank, in contrast, can take 15-20 weeks on average to process a loan application.)

Part of the company’s growth up to now has had to do with the platform gaining popularity and a higher profile – “small businesses are massively underserved by the current markets and banks,” Desai says – but part of it is also because of the investors stepping up to loan money.

There are a large amount of high net-worth individuals who are tapping into the marketplace – which Desai describes as “the stock exchange or eBay for small business loans – but now there are also a growing number of institutions as well, such as the UK government-backed British Business Bank, which in March of this year added £40 million to Funding Circle’s lending coffers.

Even with the hundreds of millions of dollars already passing through its platform, and a number of other players also looking to disrupt the same space, Desai believes that it will be some time before the space feels crowded.

“In the UK there is about $10 billion lent each month to small businesses, and in the U.S. it’s five times as much, so as though we are growing it’s still just a fraction of the market,” he says. Any competition, in other words, is good competition for now. “There is plenty of cake for all of us.”

While companies like Kabbage have tapped the finance markets to raise massive credit facilities to finance their loans, Desai says that Funding Circle will “remain committed” to its peer-to-peer marketplace model. “It’s just a more efficient model.”

The company is not profitable yet, as it continues to reinvest to expand.

Along with this round, Robert Steel, the CEO of Perella Weinberg Partners and former Under Secretary for Domestic Finance of the United States Treasury, is joining the Funding Circle board. The move is a smart one, as it adds both banking and regulatory clout to the operation, essential as it continues to grow.

“I have been impressed with the growth of the company over the past four years, and believe there is a unique opportunity for marketplace lending to revolutionize access to finance for small businesses across the globe,” Steel said in a statement. “I hope my experience as CEO of one of America’s largest banks, and my time in the US Treasury department, will support the company as we enter the next stage of our growth.”

Image: Flickr

Zillow Acquires Retsly, A Service That Helps Developers Access Real Estate Listings

Real estate site Zillow today announced that it has acquired Retsly, a Vancouver, B.C.-based startup that helps developers access real-estate data from multiple listing services (MLS). The service takes the data from these sites and normalizes it so developers can more easily use the data in their own applications. The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

MLSs are the central hub for real estate data in the U.S., but they are also very insular. Every region has its own and in total, there are about 1,000 different systems. That wouldn’t be a huge problem if this were just about geographic distribution, but all of these MLSs use different software and often describe homes in different terms.

Retsly was founded in 2013 by Kyle Campbell and Joshua Lopour, who I first met at the Grow conference in Vancouver last year (Growlabs also incubated the service). Few people know more about the state of MLSs in the U.S. than these two Canadians, and Retsly was actually responsible for holding the first real estate hackathon at the National Association of Realtors conference in 2013. Given that the MLSs have generally been extremely protective of their data and the real estate business is somewhat suspicious of technology, that was quite an achievement by itself.

As Zillow’s Chief Revenue Officer Greg Schwartz to me, though, it’s worth noting that the data the MLSs provide to Retsly is only to be used by applications that were authorized by the MLS for use in the specific market the MLS covers. They get to decide how the data is used.

In addition to its service for developers, Retsly also provides MLSs with tools to manage software applications in their market and ensure that their content is being used appropriately.

“Retsly’s team and cutting-edge technology is a great fit with Zillow and aligns with our goal to offer great value and services to our industry partners,” said Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff in a statement today. “We’re thrilled to welcome Retsly to Zillow.”

The service will continue to function as usual and Lopour says the acquisition will help the company to accelerate “the growth of a vibrant software community within the industry.”

Schwartz tells me that he believes Retsly is a great fit for Zillow. “This is an extension of our efforts to provide productivity tools to help MLSs, brokers, franchisors, teams and agents be more productive and successful,” he said. At the same time, though, he also believes that this acquisition goes a bit further than some of Zillow’s previous ones in that it provides developers with the data to create new applications and that it gives the MLSs the ability to mange that data. “We believe that when the real estate ecosystem thrives, Zillow also benefits,” Schwartz said.

IMAGE BY Flickr USER Ian Muttoo UNDER CC BY-SA 2.0 LICENSE (IMAGE HAS BEEN MODIFIED)

Tech Entrepreneur Priya Haji, Founder And CEO Of SaveUp, Has Passed Away At 44

Priya Haji, a Silicon Valley tech entrepreneur known for her focus on socially-minded ventures in both the for-profit and non-profit spaces, most recently as CEO and co-founder of personal financial savings app SaveUp, passed away unexpectedly of natural causes on July 14th at the age of 44.

SaveUp co-founder and CFO Sammy Shreibati confirmed the news to TechCrunch today.

Prior to founding SaveUp, Haji co-founded and led World of Good, a marketplace for fair trade and sustainable goods made by female artisans from developing countries. World of Good was acquired by eBay in February 2010. Haji founded her first social venture, a free health clinic in her hometown of Bryan, Texas, while she was still in high school, according to a 2011 profile published in Forbes. Haji earned a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UC Berkeley.

Shreibati shared the following statement on behalf of SaveUp:

“I am incredibly saddened to write that my friend and co-founder Priya Haji passed away at her home on the evening of July 14, 2014. Her 11-month-old daughter and 2-year-old son survive her.

Priya’s nickname was ‘Firecracker’, a name that her mother gave her because her birthday was on the 4th of July. At SaveUp we fed off her energy and passion to build something that helped the world. From her non-profit work at Free At Last to her ventured-backed companies World of Good and SaveUp, Priya was always striving to help people in everything she did. She was a courageous leader and colleague, but first and foremost a friend.

Priya was one of the pioneers of female entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley. When she asked me to create this amazing company with her, I was honored and thrilled to be a part of it. She was an inspiration and made me a better person.

We lost a wonderful leader, innovator, and friend and all of us at SaveUp are profoundly grieving.”

Memorials to Haji have also been shared over the past two days by many saddened friends and colleagues on Twitter and Facebook. Chicago-based entrepreneur Cheryl Dahle has established a crowdfunding campaign on Fundly to help support Haji’s young children.

In the 2011 interview with Forbes, Haji said her ultimate goal in business was to help solve problems for people in need, and encouraged others to do the same. She said:

“My entrepreneurial imagination gets inspired by seeing how I can help people through an innovative use of business or technology. …I think the best ideas to solve the biggest problems are still out there to be done – and someone reading this article might have one. If that is you – trust yourself, and go for it! The worst thing that can happen is that it will not work, and who knows: You might create something even better than you imagined.”

Haji also discussed her outlook on using business and technology for social good in a 2012 video interview with Aol’s Makers series. You can watch that embedded below.

Priya Haji was an inspirational and positive presence in the technology and business worlds, and she will be greatly missed.