Web 2.0: PayPal wants payment apps in your phone and fridge with its new platform
PayPal is opening up a platform to developers on November 3, to spur innovation in outside payment apps that can connect with anything as far out as physical advertisements or home appliances.
“PayPal will be the first truly global online payment service to open its platform to everyone,” said president Scott Thompson, speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit today in San Francisco. “We’ll be releasing APIs that will allow anyone in the industry to create new… Continue Reading
PayPal blackout hits e-commerce
EBay-owned payments service PayPal has said that its vision is to become the “electricity” for e-commerce, i.e., the underlying technology for all payments on the web. So I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that, as happens once in a while with electricity, PayPal experienced a blackout this morning.
PayPal posted on its blog about the outage, reporting that “PayPal started experiencing site issues that affected the ability to send and receive money,” followed by an update… Continue Reading
PayPal tries to revamp e-commerce by opening to developers
PayPal has been talking about opening up its payment technology to third-party developers for a few weeks now (ever since TechCrunch broke the news by publishing a leaked internal document), but today it offered more details at a developer event in San Jose, Calif.
The big vision for the platform, as articulated by PayPal spokespeople, is to provide the “electricity” for e-commerce, by becoming the underlying technology for payments on the web. Of course, PayPal already… Continue Reading
Obopay scores $70M from Nokia for mobile payments
Obopay, provider of a mobile service that lets people transfer money to one another through text messages, just received an investment from Nokia, estimated at $70 million. [Update: It turns out that not all of this money came from Nokia, as most people reported. There were other undisclosed investors involved. TechCrunch suggests that several of Obopay's old-faithful firms also chipped in, including Qualcomm, Redpoint Ventures, Onset Ventures and Richmond Management, but nothing has been confirmed.]… Continue Reading
Paymo raises round for mobile payment system
Paying for goods with a cell phone has been a pipe dream for a long time. Paymo is the latest company that enables merchants to set up a cell-phone payment system. The company has raised a $5 million seed round of funding.
See the company’s full press release here.
Margaret Mackenzie, chief financial officer, told VentureWire that the amount was a convertible note and declined to name the angels who contributed.
Paymo was founded in 2007 with the… Continue Reading
Lithium scores money to grow corporate social networks
updated
Lithium Technologies, which builds and operates social networks for enterprises, has raised $12 million in venture capital today.
The company’s clients include Dell, AT&T, Sony PlayStation, Univision, and PayPal — all businesses with large user communities and heavy customer service and product support needs. Lithium’s community sites are designed to help these clients streamline the interaction with their customers and improve brand loyalty. To get an idea of how the sites function, take a look at… Continue Reading
Monday deal fever: Fraud Sciences, Trolltech, E-Dialog, Anywhere.fm all acquired
A number of companies decided to compete with DEMO for media coverage today by announcing some rather large acquisitions:
Paypal ponied up $170 million for Fraud Sciences, which prevents online fraud;
Nokia paid $153 million for Trolltech, which helps developers build cross-platform applications;
GSI Commerce gave $157 million for E-Dialog, an e-commerce company;
Finally, Imeem bought Anywhere.fm, an internet radio service.
Here are a few notes on each:
Paypal’s acquisition of Fraud Sciences was an all-cash deal for $170 million. The company had taken less… Continue Reading
Revolution Money raises $50M to take on PayPal, upend credit card industry
Revolution Money, a new company backed by former AOL chief executive Steve Case, has launched a free online money transfer service to compete with PayPal. It has landed $50 million in a second round of funding.
The service is designed to be used on fast-growing instant messaging services such as AOL’s AIM and other social networking sites, and could appeal to younger users who balk at PayPal’s fees.
The Largo, Florida company is also offering a credit… Continue Reading
Roundup: Geomas’ geo-search patent, Google’s privacy, YouTube filters, and more
Here’s the latest (updated) action:
Geomas says it has location-based search patent — The London based company says its patent is being infringed upon by some 20 large internet players, and this probably includes Google and Yahoo. Here’s a description of the patent. The company says it raising $20 million to help it extract licensing deals. It started by suing Verizon. (Via Techdirt).
KyteTV gets investment from Nokia — See our story here.
IPO market sees strongest month since 2004,… Continue Reading
PayPal’s “other” story, and Wikio, Infinera, Zoho, Omnidrive & more
Roundup of the latest action in Silicon Valley & tech:
PayPal’s origin explored, one more time — Online payments company Paypal has spawned more Internet entrepreneurs from its founding team than any other company we know. Yet PayPal had a rushed and tumultuous birth; if you’re curious about yet another version of PayPal history, this is worth a read: Co-founder Elon Musk (pictured here) rejects the version that suggests he was a lesser player.
Wikio, which looks remarkably… Continue Reading
Google uses homepage to go after PayPal
Lots of buzz about Google’s decision to use its homepage to promote its online payment product, Google Checkout, in its continued effort to encroach upon leader PayPal.
Read/WriteWeb has details.
Google’s homepage is one of the most popular, and it has remained spartan so that anything it promotes will likely capture the eye. We’re not aware of Google doing such overt promotion before. However, when we checked Google’s homepage ourselves, we didn’t see the promotion.
So Google generates… Continue Reading
Roundup: SpotDJ for iTunes, reporter embedded in Second Life & more
SpotDJ, an angel-backed start-up in San Francisco, yesterday launched a service that lets people insert “spots” within iTunes music, which can be listened to by other SpotDJ users. The short spots can be descriptions of the song’s artist, a back-story to the song, or a recommendation about a different version.
Here’s how it works: Once you’ve downloaded SpotDJ, you can listen to a song on iTunes, and then hit the “spot this song” button. That lets… Continue Reading
Roundup: PixSense, Piczo, Imeem’s new model & more
PixSense, latest start-up to offer video compression, is hiring! — This Santa Clara start-up claims no one has been able to compress a video by 85 percent to share it via mobile phone.
It is offering such a feature to consumers and carriers. Some 90 percent of cell-phone users don’t have a set data plan, meaning they pay for bandwidth they use while sending pictures. PixSense will lower costs. It will also sell its technology to… Continue Reading