Payleven is a payments startup based in Germany that turns mobile devices into point-of-sale terminals through the use of a dongle. A dongle, for those of you who may be out of the lingo loop, is a small piece of hardware that plugs into a device, and Payleven’s enable credit card transactions.

Square is the most well-known first startup to send the dongle to the soaring heights of popularity it now enjoys. Payleven is applying similar technology and business models to the European market. A statement issued by the company claims it is the first company in Continental Europe to fulfill the high security standards required for this type of product and service. Payleven has worked closely with Visa to ensure the standards are appropriate and up to snuff.

For this, it has raised a vague “high single-digit USD million funding” from a mysterious, new, unnamed investor. Previous investors New Enterprise Associates, Holtzbrinck Ventures, ru-Net, and Rocket Internet also contributed to this round. It will contribute to growing Payleven’s merchant base. Most of the clients are small and independent businesses that need an easy way to accept credit card payments. Payleven takes a small percentage of every transaction and there is no minimum turnover or fixed fee.

Payleven is currenty available in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, Great Britain, Poland, and Brazil. It has 70 employees, with headquarters in Berlin and an office in London.

Munich-based Paymill has raised €10 million ($13.2 million) for its API that quickly and easily enables online credit card payments.

Similar to the San Francisco-based startup Stripe, Paymill offers a “quick start” solution for online stores and service providers to set up an online payment system. All they have to do is copy and paste a few lines of code and “poof!” E-commerce.

Paymill charges a 2.95 percent of the transaction amount, as well as 0.28€ ($0.37) for every successful transaction. The service is secure, and Paymill offers documentation and support for its customers. From the dashboard, businesses can track the amount of clients, transactions, turnover, and success rate over time.

The company launched in Munich in June of 2012 and quickly became active in 34 countries. According to a statement, “Paymill is the first provider to have brought the simple and user-friendly technical solution to Europe.” As the European technology community and e-commerce continue to heat up, so does the demand for simple payment integrations.

Paymill will use the funding to develop the technical platform and improve customers support efforts, as well as continue to enter new markets. German accelerator Rocket Internet, Holtzbrink Ventures, RI Digital, and Sunstone Capital contributed to this round, which comes to over $13 million.

Stripe expanded its payment processing platform into Canada today, so Canadian businesses, mounties, and hockey players can integrate the technology into their websites. If they aren’t too busy drinking maple syrup, that is.

But seriously, developers use Stripe to enable transactions online. The platform powers commerce for thousands of companies that want to accept payments online, like Foursquare, MoMA, and Shopify.

Stripe handles card storage information, subscriptions, and interactions with bank accounts. Rather than building their own platforms, developers can use Stripe’s API and begin doing business.

While payments can be paid out to anywhere in the world, the crossing of the border into Canada means that our Northern brethren can now accept payments as well. The service is the same, and the company views it as the first step in their international expansion.

In her blog post about the news, employee Sheena Pakanati wrote about how going abroad fits into Stripe’s overall mission.

“In many ways, launching in Canada is a big step for us—going from ’1′ to ’2′ is often harder than going from ’2′ to ‘n’—but it’s only a small piece of what we have in mind,” she said. “We grew up in countries from Honduras to Kenya, and a large part of why we’re so eager to build Stripe is to help those outside the U.S. to participate as first-class citizens in the Internet economy.”

The company added $20 million to its bank in July and is valued at hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s roster of investors involves some of the biggest names in the venture capital world: Sequoia, Peter Thiel, Andreessen Horowitz, Elon Musk, General Catalyst, and Redpoint.

Stripe is in San Francisco, and it tells those who are interested to watch for updates.

Where in the world will this company go next? Like searching for Waldo, just keep an eye out for stripes.

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Digital transactions leader PayPal has started rolling out a brand new design to its main website for some users Tuesday. [See update below.]

Unfortunately, I wasn’t one of the lucky ones to see the updated site, but I can say for certain that it’s long overdue. If I had to put the old site into a metaphor, I’d say it was sort of like an extremely useful accountant friend who is out of touch with fashion from the previous two decades — smart, but always goofy looking. Like an above-average Dreamweaver template from the late ’90s, it has tons of tabs along the top navigation with  really obscure descriptors that force you to click through each one when you can’t find something.

By contrast, the screenshots I’ve seen of the new PayPal website design show a full makeover worthy of the hard-earned money you spend through its transaction service. The top title is a hokey message that reads: “When it came to updating our website, we brought in an expert: You.” Obviously this is a lie, because most people (including the folks in charge of the previous design) are not design experts. But I’ll swallow the cheesy marketing line just this once since the site does look very clean, as you can see above.

Much of the cluttered mess of the old site is now gone. The navigation now consists of three very distinct options: Buy, Sell, and Transfer. It’s also got a pleasant image of a happy couple sitting at the edge of a dock, which I’m assuming will change over time.

PayPal is scheduled to officially announce the site redesign tomorrow, the company confirmed to TechCrunch. We’ll be sure to give it a full walk through once everything does go live.

Update 6/20/2012: PayPal has confirmed the redesign in an official blog post, as previously anticipated. Most of the post goes over the methodology for why the design was needed, and if you’ve ever taken a design theory class its kind of restating the basics. However, it is nice to see the company paying as much attention to its website as it did with its PayPal Here launch.

The new design should roll out to all U.S. customers within the next few weeks, with a global roll out to follow soon after, according to the company.

From the blog post:

Our old site focused more on the products and less on the way that our customers wanted to use our products. As part of this renewed focus on the customer, we are making the login process as easy and intuitive as possible and have reworked the overall navigation of the site to ensure users can get to what they want quickly. We’re also dramatically simplifying our menus and label solutions to showcase our most popular offerings, and now have an “explore” link that will highlight the newest and most exciting innovations we’re working on.

Screenshots via Sean Ludwig & Meghan Kelly

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Next time you check in to a coffee shop on Foursquare, the store manager might check your Twitter profile, look at your Facebook profile, and send a coupon your way via email.

The only reason this isn’t happening now is that it’s difficult to integrate data about these social networks, and for most restaurant and cafe operators, it’s a time-consuming distraction.

Own, a next-generation point-of-sale service provider, is adding social media integration to its service, which might make the process simpler for store managers.

Own offers its clients a customized Android tablet that acts as a point-of-sale device (replacing the old cash register) and integrates with a back-end, cloud-based service Own provides. That service gives store operators real-time information about sales at each Own “terminal,” aggregating everything into a dashboard that lets them keep an eye on the business from afar. Now, that dashboard will include integration with Twitter, Facebook, and Foursquare, enabling them to keep an eye on social media chatter alongside their sales data, as shown in the screenshot above.

The social media integration “shows the people behind the numbers,” said Own CEO Verdi Erul Ergün in an interview with VentureBeat.

Own is still in its beta-testing phase, with about 65 trial accounts using the service. It has processed over $2 million in transactions since its launch in October.

Own, based in San Francisco, employs about 20 people. It has received funding from Detroit Venture Partners and other investors. The company was founded in 2009, and launched in September, 2011.

Screenshot courtesy Own.

Grabble produces a point-of-sale technology that integrates with mobile phones. With the rise in NFC-enabled devices, which allow consumers to make purchases using only their phone or tablet, it makes sense for Walmart to turn its attention to this new method of payment. It’s also worth noting that a number of big companies, such as Google and PayPal, are developing technology to support transactions using a device rather than a credit card.

“Grabble started with a vision to make shopping smarter in a garage in Wollongong, Australia, and today we are pleased to announce that Walmart has acquired the company and we will be joining the @WalmartLabs team in Silicon Valley,” the company wrote in a statement. “We’re excited about seeing our passion play out on a larger stage and especially look forward to working with the team at Walmart.”

Founded in January 2010, Grabble previously received seed funding from startup incubator Startmate. Grabble was co-founded by engineers Stuart Argue and Anthony Marcar, who will both be joining Walmart Labs in Silicon Valley as part of the acquisition deal.

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Earlier reports of mobile payments provider Square raising $100 million that arose in June are now confirmed thanks to a Form D filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Chief operating officer Keith Rabois said the company is processing nearly $4 million in payments every day, and it expects to surpass $1 billion by year’s end. The company is signing up between 30,000 and 50,000 new merchants each month. The new funding round reportedly values Square at more than $1 billion, well above the company’s previous valuation of $240 million from its last funding round.

The company issues small card-reader dongles that plug into a smartphone’s headphone jack. Users then swipe a credit card through the reader, which transmits all that information to Square’s mobile application. The application is popular with small business owners who don’t want to deal with the larger transaction costs or equipment fees that other banks and business infrastructure providers sell.

If you still need evidence of Square’s rock star status in the startup world, Mary Meeker of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures and former Obama chief economy adviser Larry Summers are joining the company’s board. Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey founded Square.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Payments and financial software provider Intuit has its own mobile card swipe reader, but that’s not stopping it from saying card readers’ days are numbered.

For all the development the company has sunk into its reader — two years’ worth, since the company began working on it in February 2009 — Intuit’s payments product manager Christopher Battles told VentureBeat that the card readers will be extinct as soon as a new technology can replace it.

Intuit began distributing those card readers for free along with a pre-paid card for all Intuit GoPayment users in 2009. Whenever a small business swipes a card makes a transaction, Intuit takes a 2.7 percent transaction fee and then delivers the funds to the pre-paid account. The transaction takes a little more than a day to process, Battles said.

Intuit will tell you any day of the week its reader isn’t like Square’s, its main competitor, whose reader plugs into a headphone jack on mobile devices like the iPhone or iPad. Square has garnered lots of hype even though Intuit’s reader was on the market first. Intuit also benefits from its brand recognition as a financial services software company — it also develops popular software like TurboTax and QuickBooks.

Intuit is also placing a bet on near-field communication (NFC), which uses short-wave radio waves to transmit data between devices. PayPal just recently launched an NFC service of its own which lets you you tap together two NFC-equipped Nexus S phones to make a transaction.

“We’re competing with a 7-second transaction time, it’s hard to provide enough features to compete with that,” Battles said. “Near-field communication is interesting, it has a future, but we don’t think we’ve cracked the code on it yet.”

Another product manager on the payments team said the card readers were a short-term game for handling mobile payments.

“The reader is for today, it won’t be true eventually,” Intuit senior product manager Mary Lunnebord told VentureBeat. “And by the time we crack the code on NFC, there will probably be a third technology to replace it — no one can tell what’s going to win out right now.”

Camp BX founder Keyur Mithawala launched the site to transform Bitcoin trading — which is little more than a hobby for geeks and tech enthusiasts these days — into a professionally-traded currency. That means the site is subject to security audits from third-party security providers like McAfee. It also means that the trading options should be more robust and emulate other trading markets like the stock market, Mithawala said.

There are two other major trading sites for Bitcoins — Mt. Gox and TradeHill. But neither of those sites allows for short-selling, which is basically a hedge on the price of the Bitcoin that injects cash into the trading ecosystem. Camp BX will let its users short-sell Bitcoins, which will help stabilize the volatility for the young currency. Today, an 8 percent swing in the value of the Bitcoin throughout the day is pretty typical.

“They have kind of a hobby project feel to them, and they are doing $27 million a month in trades,” Mithawala said. “Other than speculators, no one wants to deal with a highly volatile currency like that.”

Mt. Gox, one of the largest trading sites for Bitcoins, has around 60,000 users. But a majority of those users did not have a balance of Bitcoins, so only around 6,000 of those users are active traders, Mithawala said. Mt. Gox was also recently hacked, sending the price of the Bitcoin down to nearly zero before it later recovered. That site was basically forced to roll back the trade and pretend the whole incident never happened.

Bitcoins are designed to remove the middle man in transactions. That can be a transaction provider like PayPal or a bank when someone makes a purchase with a credit or debit card. When someone makes a transaction, the Bitcoin is automatically transferred to the recipient through an encrypted transaction that ensures Bitcoins can’t be hacked or created artificially. New Bitcoins are added to the market through “Bitcoin Mining” — a process where individuals run servers that handle Bitcoin transactions and get paid in Bitcoins for doing so.

Camp BX, like other online Bitcoin trading sites, takes a cut of the transaction as a fee. The site charges 0.55 percent of the transaction made as a fee for letting Bitcoin traders use the website. But that transaction fee is still lower than what PayPal and other payment providers charge, which keeps it in line with the Bitcoin ethos of trying to eliminate transaction costs, Mithawala said.

The number of Bitcoins available to users is algorithmically limited — meaning the number of new Bitcoins introduced into the economy decreases over time and reaches a cap of somewhere around 21 million. That means that, similar to days on the stock market where there is low trading volume, smaller moves in the market are able to cause greater swings in the value of the Bitcoin.

Camp BX is based in Atlanta, Ga., and has four employees — Mithawala and three contractors. Mithawala founded the company in May this year and spent the next several months rolling out the trading service. The company built the service in a little more than a month, and the site ran around 1,600 transactions amounting to 90,000 Bitcoins in the 11-day testing phase. The site has around 200 users so far.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

A trojan horse virus that steals Bitcoins, a digital currency that people can use for transactions online, has been spotted in the wild, according to computer security software firm Symantec.

The trojan, called Infostealer.coinbit, finds a Bitcoin owner’s “digital wallet”, which contains information about the individual’s Bitcoins, and mails it to the attacker. The hacker can then use a brute-force attack to discover the password for the Bitcoin wallet and steal the owner’s Bitcoins.

The new announcement today adds to concerns about the safety of investing in the digital currency, which faces the same security problems that anything else stored on a network or hard drive faces. The whole Bitcoin ecosystem is also inevitably linked to computer systems. And there have been plenty of instances where even some of the best online services, like Amazon’s cloud computing, have failed for significant periods of time.

This is the second time Bitcoins have made news because of potential security concerns linked to the currency’s digital origins. A thief recently stole 25,000 Bitcoins — which amounted to roughly $500,000 at the time they were stolen — from a compromised Windows computer.

Geeks and tech-savvy individuals have heralded Bitcoins as the next evolution of currency because it is designed to remove the middle man in transactions. That can be a transaction provider like PayPal or a bank when someone makes a purchase with a credit or debit card. When someone makes a transaction, the Bitcoin is automatically transferred to the recipient through an encrypted transaction that ensures Bitcoins can’t be hacked or created artificially.

New Bitcoins are added to the market through “Bitcoin Mining” — a process where individuals run servers that handle Bitcoin transactions and get paid in Bitcoins for doing so. The number of Bitcoins available to users is algorithmically limited — meaning the number of new Bitcoins introduced into the economy decreases over time and reaches a cap of somewhere around 21 million. That means that, similar to days on the stock market where there is low trading volume, smaller moves in the market are able to cause greater swings in the value of the Bitcoin. An 8 percent swing in the value of the Bitcoin throughout the day is pretty typical.

Symantec said that the whole method of generating Bitcoins was an open invitation to malware developers to exploit the system. Tech-savvy hackers that control botnets — a massive network of computers that they can send commands to — can use those huge botnets to generate nearly $100,000 a month through Bitcoin mining based on an exchange rate of $20 per Bitcoin.

Despite a lot of hype surrounding the new currency, the currency is facing growing pains with new reports of theft and heavy volatility in the Bitcoin trading market. The currency is unstable and is being used mostly as a speculative vehicle, according to the consensus answer on question-and-answer site Quora.