Airbrite, a Y Combinator-backed e-commerce startup, is debuting its first product today called Celery (its name a play on the world “sell”). Celery is designed to be a “pre-commerce” store builder – or, in other words, it allows anyone to start selling ahead of having a product to ship. That means sellers can start taking credit cards now, then charge when their… → Read More
Wanderful Media has raised another $9 million from the long list of media companies that were already backing the startup and its local deal service Find&Save.
The announcement comes after the relaunch of Find&Save last month. The service allows readers to browse deals aggregated from newspaper circulars, retailers, and other data sources. That was the first big redesign since Wanderful… → Read More
Some more consolidation afoot in the worlds of mobile marketing and mobile payments: Payvia, one of the many startups working in the area of carrier-based mobile billing, is buying Mogreet, a mobile marketing company that delivers campaigns via text, video and picture messaging services. Terms of the deal were not disclosed — although we have contacted the company to ask. Payvia says that the… → Read More
Google is facing another competition investigation, according to the Financial Post. The Canadian Competition Bureau has informed Mountain View of its plans to launch a formal investigation of its Canadian operations. It has not yet requested any information or documents from Google but has informed the search giant of its intention to launch a probe. → Read More
Today, thanks to the maturation of the web, digital tech, and smartphones now in seemingly every pocket, startups are finding it easier than ever before to build scalable solutions to finally address the many inefficiencies in our food manufacturing, production and distribution systems.
As interest in food tech balloons, one area in particular appears to already be at the tipping point: Online… → Read More
eBay has just updated its mobile app with a whole host of new features and a revamped look. To start, the refreshed UI makes it clear that eBay wants a more heavy-duty offering for its mobile users. You can now enjoy larger photo views, a better system for auctions that are about to end, and the added feature of being able to checkout multiple items at the same time.
But all that’s just fluff… → Read More
Telefonica is today announcing a deal with Samsung that will see it make an even bigger move into the area of carrier billing. Samsung will integrate the carrier’s billing backend directly into its own mobile services, meaning that the Telefonica customers (it has 316 million worldwide) who use the Samsung Hub and Samsung Apps portals on Samsung smartphones will be able to buy apps, music, videos… → Read More
BitPay, the startup with ambitions to become the PayPal of the bitcoin world, is today announcing that it has raised another $2 million. And in what is a kind of poetic justice, the round is led by none other than the Founders Fund, the VC started by what’s commonly called the PayPal Mafia. → Read More
Google I/O, the company’s sixth annual developer conference, got officially underway in San Francisco on Wednesday, and it was an eventful day. It took the company every minute of its epic three-hour keynote to unfurl a laundry list of announcements and updates, seemingly across every product category in its arsenal — from Android, Chrome and Search to Maps, Google+ and Hangouts — each with a… → Read More
Flying under the radar amid a flurry of announcements from today’s Google I/O developer conference is the bigger news of how Google is stepping up its efforts to compete with online payment giants, such as PayPal. It plans to do so with a revamped checkout process for the web, mobile web, within mobile applications running on Android, and more.
It’s a proposed death to PayPal by a thousand… → Read More
Another funding raise for a collaborative consumption startup: Spain-based private sales club Privalia, which sells branded clothes and accessories at discounted prices to members in the five markets it currently plays in, has closed a new €25m round ($32.3m). The company did not specify which round this latest raise falls under but has previously raised a total of $218m in two rounds. → Read More
Walmart, via its Silicon Valley innovation lab @WalmartLabs, today announced the acquisition of two startups: cloud computing newcomer OneOps and the software development shop Tasty Labs, from Delicious founder Joshua Schachter. Tasty Labs offered two services Jig.com and Human.io – both domains which are now redirecting to Walmart’s acquisition announcement, along with that of… → Read More
PayPal today announced Cash for Registers to encourage merchants to switch to PayPal-powered point-of-sale solutions. The program is part of the payment giant’s bid to be the kingpin among local merchants looking for lower-cost ways of accepting credit card payments. The announcement comes on the same day that Square launched Stand to complement its Square register product on iPad tablets and… → Read More
As a fourth generation venture investor, Adam Draper was pretty much predestined to work with startups. The son of Tim Draper, the founder of global VC firm Draper Fisher Jurveston, Adam has made it his mission to do everything in his power to help entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life — without relying on his family name to do so. After taking the plunge as an entrepreneur himself, co-founding… → Read More
A number of startups have been trying their hand at subscription-based children’s books services, or something like a “Netflix for kids’ books,” so to speak. Today, another entry called Zoobean joins the flock, with the debut of its own handpicked catalog which parents can either subscribe to, or choose to just shop online like a standard e-commerce website. The company was… → Read More
E-commerce leviathan Amazon today is taking a step into social gaming: Amazon Coins, its new virtual currency, is now live in the U.S. To kick it off, Amazon announced that it would put $5 worth of the currency — equivalent to 500 Coins — into all Kindle Fire users’ accounts to use on apps and in-app purchases on its platform. The company says that this is equivalent to “tens of millions of… → Read More
Groupon is once again expanding its portfolio of mobile payment services, putting it in closer competition with the likes of Square and PayPal’s here targeting local merchants: today it has released Groupon POS, which appears to be an iPad-specific version of its mobile payments service aimed at local merchants, working as a dashboard to make and track payments. → Read More
With India’s annual GDP growth of about 5 to 6 percent per year, a new wave of affluent consumers is coming. While there have been e-commerce successes like Flipkart, a handful of local startups are targeting the upper-end of the market. Squarekey is a startup that brings high-end fashion brands to India for the same prices as ones that a consumer would pay in the West. “Retail is… → Read More
Rocket Internet, the German-based e-commerce startup incubator from the Samwer brothers, is today announcing another round of funding for its strategy to build out its footprint into emerging markets. Today it’s the turn of Middle-East-based fashion commerce site Namshi, which is getting $13 million from Summit Partners. This is the second time Summit, a Rocket regular, has invested in Namshi… → Read More
Woot, the daily deals site that Amazon bought in 2010 for $110 million, built a reputation for its “pile ‘em high, sell ‘em cheap” business model for shifting goods. Now, the company is facing up to a shift of a different kind: that of its own talent. In the last week, TechCrunch has learned that five six key employees are parting ways with the company. → Read More
Most people may not yet be using smartphones to pay for goods when they are out shopping, but that doesn’t mean that they are not glued to their handsets anyway. Some research out today from Google indicates that among smartphone owners, some 79% can be classified as “mobile shoppers,” using their devices for some aspect of the shopping experience, from finding store locations through to finding… → Read More
Quidsi, the Amazon-owned parent company to a collection of single-word, e-commerce domains, including Diapers.com, Soap.com, Wag.com, Yoyo.com, and more, is today launching a new membership program called Familyhood Plus. The program offers consumers free two-day shipping with no minimum purchases and other exclusive deals.
Prior to today, Quidsi sites would only promise free two-day shipping… → Read More
Elena Fesenko grew up in the fashion industry. Her mother worked as a buyer for Bloomingdale’s, and she herself spent time both as a fashion design student and model. Now Fesenko has translated her experience and passion for fashion into MIKA, a new startup which showcases complete outfits featuring a mix of high-end and contemporary apparel and accessories. Shoppers can buy these looks in… → Read More
Online real estate company Trulia has announced it plans to acquire real estate SaaS CRM provider Market Leader for approximately $355 million. The pair said the rational for the merger is to create a “combined platform” that covers both house buyers and real estate agents, with Trulia’s front end listing businesses being complemented by Market Leader’s back-end SaaS CRM. → Read More
Urban Compass, a New York-based startup that last year raised an $8 million seed round while still in stealth mode, is coming out of the shadows of the city and debuting its first services in public beta: a hyperlocal social network, called the Urban Compass Network, and a housing rentals platform that brings online the whole process of finding, securing and subsequently paying for a place to… → Read More
The food delivery wars continue to heat up: today foodpanda, the Rocket Internet-incubated startup that offers a one-stop service to order food from a selection of restaurants and take-out joints to be brought to your door and now working with some 15,000 restaurants globally, is today announcing that it has picked up over $20 million in funding, with participation from Rocket regular AB Kinnevik… → Read More
In this day and age, if you own a small business, you need a web (and mobile) presence. It’s just the way it is. Some might opt just to go for a social media approach, a Twitter account and a Facebook page, but the likelihood is that you want something a little more flexible, high-quality and something that gives you more control over the user experience. More and more, people are turning to… → Read More
While Foursquare has been the most hyped location startup out of New York, there is actually another startup that is growing a real business from serving merchants with about 150,000 locations globally. Yext has quietly grown to 200 employees through a platform that makes it easy for brands and small businesses to manage their location data across more than 50 search engines, mapping companies and… → Read More
Shakil Khan, an angel investor and advisor to Spotify, just launched Coindesk, a Bitcoin resource and news site, amid a boatload of hype and VC interest in the crypto-currency. Khan says Coindesk was a project he conceived of about four weeks ago, around when Bitcoin was surging to an all-time high. It’s now trading at around $124.38, or about half as much as it was trading at a few weeks… → Read More
Because there are so many small businesses out there on Main Street that don’t have access to the same juicy venture capital rounds that seem pervade today’s tech industry, On Deck set out in 2007 to provide mom-and-pop business owners with an easy way to secure the capital they need to grow their businesses. Using data aggregation and electronic payment technology, On Deck aims to simplify the… → Read More
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