Photo-sharing may seem a very saturated space but there’s still room for disruption reckons Seattle-based startup Linea, which is aiming to reinvent how people share multiple sets of photos with its horizontally scrolling filmstrip of images. The startup has just closed a $4 million seed round, with investment from an undisclosed group of Angel investors, and is about to start raising a Series A. → Read More
Believe.in, a VC-backed U.K.-based charity donation platform that’s disrupting the cause-giving space by not charging any fees on donations, has announced a partnership with easy payments API startup Stripe — to allow charities to receive direct payments faster than would otherwise be the case. The pair claim payments will be up to one month faster than the “existing norm”, as a result. → Read More
Threadflip, the online and mobile marketplace that helps users clean out their closets, or buy from those who are doing just that, is today introducing a completely revamped mobile experience for its iOS application following a surge of growth from its mobile user base. It’s a welcome change, and one that should help the company better compete with similar services from Poshmark or thredUP… → Read More
Although you can’t ditch your leather-bound billfold yet, a startup called Lemon has been slowly building up a mobile wallet platform that’s encroaching on the traditional wallet’s territory, and even making it better in some cases. Today, it’s extending its feature set again with the addition of an expense reporting tool, which serves to augment its previously available receipt capture… → Read More
Pinterest is rubbing up against the limits of its own overmodest acceptable usage policy. The social site that lets people share images of things they really dig has told the FT it plans to allow more nude images to be pinned by users — following complaints from artists and photographers about its current nudes ban. No nudity is the first clause in Pinterest’s current acceptable use policy. → Read More
The world of payments is being turned over by the likes of Square, PayPal, Stripe and others, which are tackling the idea of payments based on hardware terminals, and new services that focus on innovations in smartphones and tablets with functionality coming by way of software iterations. Not to be outdone, incumbents like point-of-sale device maker VeriFone are also cutting their own deals to… → Read More
Etece, a Spanish TaskRabbit style startup offering an online platform for people who need a job doing but don’t have the time to do it themselves, has just closed a €450k Series A funding round, with investment from Mola Capital, Faraday Ventures Partners and Starcaps Ventures. The company, which was founded in Madrid six months ago, had previously raised €500k from three European… → Read More
After closing a $4m round in March, led by Battery Ventures and Hasso Plattner Ventures, Berlin-based multi-mode travel search platform GoEuro has now launched its website in open beta in the U.K. and Germany, as the first stage of its European rollout. The startup is aiming to simplify the problem of figuring out the best mode of transport to get from A to B. → Read More
Europe’s Competition Commissioner has indicated he is very likely to ask Google for more concessions as part of the EC’s ongoing investigation into Mountain View’s search and advertising practices. Google submitted proposals to the Commission to allay their concerns back in February but now it looks like the company has not done enough to please the EC. → Read More
Nobody’s quite sure when (and if) Bitcoin will go mainstream, but plenty of investors and entrepreneurs have begun to place their bets. The snowball is off and rolling.
If this post doesn’t make it clear why venture capitalists are loving this emerging market, just in the last two months, we’ve seen the Winklevosses admit they have a crush on Bitcoin, Liberty City Ventures launch its own… → Read More
The ROI of social media is something of a black box for many e-commerce companies, but New York-based startup Olapic is beginning to change that. The company, which allows brands to collect user-generated photos from services like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to display on their own website, is now offering an analytics suite to help retailers and brands understand what content works and how… → Read More
Imonomy, an Israeli startup which makes software that analyses webpages and automatically inserts relevant, copyright-free images to accompany the content, has closed a $400,000 seed round from a group of angel investors. Investors include Inon Axel, former CEO of Kasamba, Liron Rose, cofounder of AfterDownload, and Itai Levitan and Tal Shaked, partners at AfterDownload. → Read More
GiftCards.com, a Pittsburgh-based company that has been around for more than a decade and has sold 5 million gift cards, agreed to buy San Francisco startup Giftly to grow out a mobile platform. The terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Giftly had raised about $2.8 million from investors including Baseline Ventures, SoftTech VC, Floodgate, Thrive Capital, and Techstars’ David Tisch. → Read More
Amazon has reportedly submitted plans for a new futuristic headquarters in Seattle that couples a skyscraper and an accompanying tri-sphere bio-dome like structure. According to the plans, the structure will be able to hold various forms of plant life and become a place where employees can “work and socialize in a more natural, park-like setting.”
Because God forbid employees walk to the park… → Read More
SumUp, one of the myriad European Square-style mobile card reader startups, has expanded its coverage footprint by rolling into an 11th European market: Russia. SumUp is now operational in the U.K., Germany, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, Belgium and Russia, giving it a larger geographical footprint than other European rivals including iZettle and Payleven. → Read More
Zalora, a Zappos-style fashion e-commerce site in South East Asia backed by the Samwer brothers’ Rocket Internet incubator in Germany, is today announcing its latest investment — $100 million, led by Rocket Internet itself, along with regular Samwer investing partners Summit Partners, Investment AB Kinnevik, Verlinvest and Tengelmann Group. The is the largest investment in Zalora to date, and one… → Read More
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
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