PayNearMe, an alternative payments product from the company formerly known as Kwedit, provides a compelling way for the ‘unbanked’ to use cash payments for online goods. The “unbanked” refers to consumers who don’t have traditional bank accounts or cannot qualify for credit cards. PayNearMe allows people who don’t have or don’t want to use credit or debit cards to purchase products, pay for bills and more with cash at thousands of 7-Eleven stores in the continental U.S. And today, PayNearMe is announcing it’s first implementation of its utility bill product the City of Fairfield, Calif.
Here’s how PayNearMe works. With participating partners, e-commerce or merchant sites, consumers can use the PayNearMe option to pay for purchases or debts owed. You simply place your order with PayNearMe and print out the given receipt. You then take that receipt into a 7-Eleven and they scan it and you pay in cash. Once you pay, your order with the retailer or merchant will be fulfilled. → Read More
Innovid, a video advertising startup, has raised $9.5 million round led by Sequoia Capital with Genesis Partners and T-Ventures (Deutsche Telecom) participating in the round. As part of the funding round, Sequoia partner Gili Raanan will join Innovid’s Board of Directors. This investment brings Innovid’s total funding to $17 million.
Innovid develops an interactive pre-roll advertising product, called iRoll, that allows advertisers to turn any existing pre-roll video ad into an interactive one. And users are encouraged to click and perform mouse gestures with the interactive ads to gain further information.
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Quite big news from Sony, Hitachi, and Toshiba today: according to Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun [JP], the three companies today decided to merge their LCD businesses, at least for smaller and mid-sized screens used in smartphones, handheld gaming devices and tablets.
If the report is to be believed, a joint venture will be set up by the end of the year. What’s interesting is that the so-called Innovation Network Corporation of Japan, a semi-public organization, will control a whopping 70% of the newly formed company. The organization is ready to invest a total of US$2.6 billion (and fend off competition from South Korea, Taiwan and other places). → Read More
Exclusive - Talk about a halo effect. Kik, a developer of cross-platform mobile communication apps, says something really strange happened when they launched their Windows Phone 7 application last June: user growth across the iOS and Android platform both accelerated significantly.
Turns out every registered user of the Windows Phone 7 Kik Messenger app is ‘worth’ 2.53 users (see explanation on methodology and accompanying image after the jump). → Read More
As the summer winds down and we near the fall, we know two things are for sure about to enter existence in the world of Apple: iOS 5 and iCloud. Given that both offer third-party developers various opportunities, both are in the process of being tested by that community. And that means things are starting to leak out. Tonight brought perhaps the biggest surprise revelation yet: iTunes in the Cloud will support streaming as well as downloading of music.
Now, before everyone works themselves into a tizzy yelling “FIRST!!!”, yes, it’s true that other music services have offered cloud-based streaming before — notably both Google Music Beta and Amazon Cloud Player this past summer. But neither of those is iTunes, the largest music retailer on the planet (online or “offline”). And there are plenty of other services that are streaming-only. It now seems certain that this fall, iTunes will offer both cloud downloading and cloud streaming. → Read More
Wacom has announced a pretty amazing product today, the Inkling. This so-called Digital Sketch Pen allows you to capture whatever you draw or write on a sketchbook or any kind of paper in digital form, “stroke by stroke”. Just insert a sheet of paper or a notebook into the receiver, use the Inkling Digital Pen and transfer your works to your computer to refine them digitally anytime later.
Wacom says that Inkling even lets users create layers in the digital file while sketching on paper, with the push of a button. → Read More
Here are some of yesterday’s posts on TechCrunch Gadgets: → Read More
Assumptions are rarely safe. But I’m sure most of you will come with me when I go out on a limb to say that, by and large, kids love toys. Yep. And they also love cartoons. This has been true as long as either have been around, however, a more recent taste to trend among the world’s wee ones: Love for the iPad. Some even said it was the toy of the year in 2010.
A new startup from Y Combinator’s gigantic summer batch of 63 companies launching today, called Launchpad Toys, agrees that tablets are big among kids — and that they just happen to be an incredibly effective educational tool to boot. → Read More
“You can get a mask and join the fight, too! But I heard the costume store is sold out until Friday.” – ‘Anonymous’ member (New York Times)
As supporters of ‘Anonymous’ once again take to the streets — and platforms — around San Francisco’s BART rail system, frustrated commuters might find some amusing reading in the pages of today’s New York Times.
Confirming what most of us with half a brain have known for months, Nick Bilton reports that every time someone from Anonymous buys one of those smug Guy Fawkes masks, they line the pockets of Time Warner…
“Stark white, with blushed pink cheeks, a wide grin and a thin black mustache and goatee, the mask resonates with the hackers because it was worn by a rogue anarchist challenging an authoritarian government in “V for Vendetta,” the movie produced in 2006 by Warner Brothers. What few people seem to know, though, is that Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the world and parent of Warner Brothers, owns the rights to the image and is paid a licensing fee with the sale of each mask.”
Well, duh. → Read More
After a steady stream of information in June, all has been quiet on the Facebook Project Spartan front in recent weeks. Originally, at least some thought the plan was to unveil Spartan in July — but that obviously came and went. It’s certainly possible we won’t hear anything until f8 in late September now. But one new bit of information has come to our attention that could be related. Say hello to BoltJS.
BoltJS is a UI framework that’s being built by Facebook for the purpose “helping developers build fantastic mobile web applications in HTML5 and Javascript,” as you can read for yourself here. It is written entirely in JavaScript and runs in the browser, meaning no backend processing is required. And guess where the focus of the project lies right now: mobile WebKit browsers — just like Project Spartan.
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The Building Windows 8 development blog has been an interesting read for a while. Hearing straight from developers and then seeing unfiltered responses from users and secondary devs is refreshing, even if the topic isn’t particularly compelling or I don’t agree with their design choices. Today is perhaps the most extreme example of this so far. The discussion of their new Windows 8 file manager is worth reading — but is the file manager worth using?
The new ribbon UI for the explorer window is so cluttered with different-sized buttons, labels, multi-part icons, and tabs that I can barely parse it. It’s more like a hall of mirrors than a task-oriented workspace. Is this really the new, streamlined Windows? → Read More
Ready for this week’s almost-too-ambitious Kickstarter project?
Meet iEmu, a new project from one of the iPhone’s earliest hackers. The goal? To get iOS up and running in an emulated state on Linux, Windows, Mac, and Android. → Read More
It may not be receiving quite as much media coverage as the VMAs at the moment, but we’re all acutely aware of the fact that the economy remains in the toilet. Unemployment is still over 9 percent, and articles like this one detail just how long it takes for the average American to find a job — and that job seekers are giving up on the search after as little as 5 months.
Of course, part of the problem is there just aren’t enough jobs being created, but it’s also true that the present state of job sites and marketplaces today leaves a lot to be desired. Venturocket, a job connection service based out of San Francisco, is today launching a new spin on the old model that it hopes will prove to be a more effective way to match job seekers to the right employers. With an AdWords nod, to boot. → Read More
Even before I worked at TechCrunch, Disrupt was one of the few industry conferences I looked forward to every year. There were two big reasons why: The enthusiasm and excitement of the startups who launch there, and the unparalleled lineup of the most exciting people in tech engaging in frank, honest conversations.
When we expanded the franchise to New York, it was natural to bring the most exciting Silicon Alley names on stage. That has included people like Fred Wilson and Dennis Crowley, but also the top names in media like Charlie Rose and Arianna Huffington. We even threw New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg in the mix.
In thinking through the lineup for Disrupt Beijing– our first ever International conference– I wanted to make sure we were bringing some of the most interesting personalities from the West to China. But more important was that we anchor the show with the most interesting names in the Chinese tech scene we could find. → Read More
Beyonce helped push Twitter to a new record in terms of Tweets per second yesterday evening when the pop singer announced her pregnancy at the MTV Video Music Awards. According to Twitter, Beyonce’s big MTV #VMA moment gave Twitter a record bump: 8,868 Tweets per second.
Beyonce revealed her pregnancy at the awards show last night, and the announcement culminated in the singer rubbing her baby bump on stage after her performance. That’s when Twitter saw the record number of Tweets sent. → Read More
If you’re a developer, there’s a good chance you have a handful — or more — of side projects. Things you tinker with on evenings and weekends and may upload to GitHub, but that you’ve never seriously considered releasing to the wild as a standalone service. Not because you think they’re bad, but because they’d be a lot of work to maintain — and you still have that day job to worry about.
Bushido, a Y Combinator startup that made its debut last week at Demo Day, wants to give developers a hand: they’re making it super-simple to take that app and post it online for other users to sign up for — and maybe even make some money off of it in the process.
The problem, explains Bushido cofounder Sean Grove, is that the process of converting these open-source projects into usable services, complete with authentication and payments, is something that many developers don’t want to deal with. → Read More
For ticket-selling businesses, nothing beats “sold out”. But whether or not a flight sells all of its tickets, or a sports team fills their stadium, the show must go on. Businesses with perishable inventory stand to gain the most from the daily deals model, and those that can make money on complementary goods (creating purchases that make up for revenues lost in offering the discount) can often break even — take movie theaters or sports venues, for example.
This is where a company called Goldstar enters the field. Goldstar is membership-based website for half-price live entertainment tickets, that allows venues to unload their extra tickets, make some additional revenue, and generate word-of-mouth marketing. → Read More
A unique and powerful camera hampered by uneven attention to detail and an inadequate menu system. For a camera so strongly and effectively focused on going back to basics, the legacy of ugly menus, slow focus, and chintzy dials seems especially out of place. In this case, beauty truly only is skin deep. Except for the fabulous lens and sensor, I should say.
Read on for our somewhat anecdotal review of this highly-anticipated and difficult to find camera. → Read More
Earlier today, I was checking out some new questions in the TechCrunch topic area on Quora. One in particular caught my eye: How was TechCrunch traffic affected by their major redesign in July 2011?
This has been something I’ve seen asked here and there given the radical changes we implemented — and, I assume, given the audience issues Gawker faced after their recent redesign. Mostly, people seem to want to know: is TechCrunch tanking?
I was set to weigh in, when I noticed that someone else already had. This person (not affiliated with TechCrunch) painted a picture in which our site was essentially crashing and burning since the redesign (the answer has since been removed by Quora, presumably due to down-voting). Their source? Compete. → Read More
NFC will be ubiquitous one day, but we still have quite a ways to go. Unlike other smartphone features, this requires adoption on a huge scale from just about everyone, which will definitely take a while. But we are getting closer.
While Sprint fiddles with its Google Wallet, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile have reportedly made plans to invest upwards of $100 million in their joint-venture mobile payments network, Isis. Anyone else smell the competition simmering? → Read More
