The latest from TechCrunch
- Square Starts 2011 with A New Round At A Big Valuation
- Apple iPad And iPhone 4 Top eBay's Most Popular Searches For 2010
- Like 'Twitter For iPad'? Check Out Its Facebook Counterpart, Facepad
| Square Starts 2011 with A New Round At A Big Valuation | Top |
| While much of Silicon Valley spent the last two weeks skiing or otherwise reveling in all that money made this year from acquisitions, partial liquidations and secondary deals , Square founder Jack Dorsey was apparently hard at work. TechCrunch has learned that Square is in the process of closing a large round of funding. The company is being valued, we hear from multiple sources, at somewhere close to $200 million. We don’t have confirmation on who did it, but we hear that Sequoia Capital was in the mix to lead this round, along with previous investor Khosla Ventures , Benchmark Capital and Kleiner Perkins. Our sources say Sequoia ended up on top and will lead the round. A strategic investor is also likely to invest, sources say. Someone like Visa, Mastercard, or American Express. Sequoia would be a seemingly strange fit. It’s not a firm known for doing later stage deals or for paying up on valuations. But lately the firm has deviated from that playbook with deals like Evernote and Tumblr . We hear Square’s funding was a competitive round, but have also heard that several of the top firms we expected to be in the running had some concerns about the steep valuation relative to Square’s traction, despite admiration for Dorsey and the team. Payment companies are hard to build, with fraudsters trying to exploit it and big competitors trying to run you out of the market. Square has become a media darling and has attracted an enviable team — including Keith Rabois who went through all this with PayPal – but market traction has been more elusive. It could still be a company that is so transformative it moves America’s GDP as Newsweek breathlessly anticipated a year ago, but there’s a lot of work to do first. Still, Square is processing millions of dollars a week in transactions, and we hear they’re closing in on a million dollars a day. This has the earmarks of one of those deal that VCs look back on in ten years and say “I told you so!”– we just don’t which side of the debate will have the bragging rights. CrunchBase Information Square Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Apple iPad And iPhone 4 Top eBay's Most Popular Searches For 2010 | Top |
| With eBay handling more than 2 billion U.S. product searches a quarter, the marketplace can show what items are most desirable in a given time. We recently wrote about what was trending on eBay during the holiday shopping period, and today the market place is releasing its most popular product searches in 2010. Apple dominated the list, with the iPad and iPhone 4 taking the top two spots, respectively. These gadgets were followed by Victoria’s Secret, Nintendo Wii Games, Nintendo DS, Playstation 3, Nikon d90, diamond ring, sunglasses and laptops. While there were some outliers in the list (i.e. Victoria’s Secret), it seems that searches on the marketplace were dominated by electronics and gadgets. The iPhone 4 actually topped eBay’s “top shopped” list, which revealed top products that consumers actually bought (as opposed to searched for) on eBay. In terms of top shopped, the iPad followed the iPhone 4 in fifth place. Collectively, the iPhone 4 (which sold 1.6 million related products) and the iPad accounted for over 2.2 million related products sold (this includes cases, etc.). Interestingly, neither the iPad or iPhone 4 made Amazon’s top products list this year (both are not sold on Amazon); the Kindle took the stop spot on Amazon’s list. CrunchBase Information eBay Information provided by CrunchBase | |
| Like 'Twitter For iPad'? Check Out Its Facebook Counterpart, Facepad | Top |
| In what has become one of the not-so-great mysteries of technology, Facebook still hasn’t launched a native iPad application nine months after the device made its debut, despite the fact that many thousands — perhaps even millions — of people search for it every day. Of course, that hasn’t stopped some enterprising developers from launching Facebook applications of their own — ’ Friendly for Facebook’, which is made by a third-party, has become one of the App Store’s most successful applications . But that application is hardly perfect, and now it has a new challenger: Facepad , a Facebook application that has clearly taken many design cues from Twitter’s innovative iPad application, which was released in September. The similarities are obvious, but that isn’t a bad thing. The biggest involves the way new windows are handled: just like Twitter for iPad, when you tap on a link to a piece of content Facepad will slide a new window onto the right hand side of the screen. This allows you to quickly jump to a linked article and then back to Facebook without losing your place, or between multiple friend profiles — something that isn’t so easy using a normal web browser. The application allows you to keep dozens of these tabs open at once, so you can flick across a bunch of profiles in a few seconds. It’s pretty slick, and people seem to like it. Since launching last week, Facepad has managed to get quite a bit of organic growth. In its first twelve hours the application served over a million ad impressions — that doubled to 2 million impressions after 24 hours. Now the app is up to tens of millions of page views and is the 15th most popular application on the App Store overall. At its core though, Facepad is still a reskinned version touch.facebook.com, the web-based version of the social network that Facebook has optimized for touchscreen displays (Friendly, another third-party app mentioned earlier, also uses touch.facebook.com as its core). This means that, aside from the handy nav bar at the left hand side and the window swiping, much of the application still feels like a regular website, which isn’t ideal. Cofounder Cole Ratias says that will change with the launch of Facepad V2 — the team is working to make the whole application feel more like a native app, so you’ll be able to do thinks like flick through photo albums the way you would in the iPad’s default photo application. Ratias also says that the team doesn’t want to implement anything that feels half-baked — for example, he points out the chat feature in Friendly, which takes up the full screen and feels a bit clunky. Facepad will also offer chat, but not until it can present it in smaller window overlays. Facepad is the first product from a new startup called Loytr , and the company has bigger ambitions than just becoming a better way to browse Facebook (though they’ll take that, too). In the future the company plans to integrate a gaming platform into Facepad featuring Facebook Connect-enabled, casual games that use Loytr’s APIs for monetization and other functionality (this way Loytr will be able to take a cut of revenue). The company has other plans beyond Facebook, though Ratias declined to describe them in much detail for now. Of course, there’s little doubt that Facebook is going to be release something that’s better suited for the iPad’s large display — but based on comments from CEO Mark Zuckerberg, when it comes, it may well be based on HTML5 . Zuckerberg says that Facebook doesn’t currently have enough resources to develop separate native apps for each platform, so it makes sense to make a web-based solution. One big thing to note: the current version of Facepad has a bug that will cause it to crash on iPads that are running iOS 3.2. That’s an older version that lacks key features introduced in 4.2, like multitasking, but a significant number of users are still running it. Facepad has submitted an update that fixes the bug and is waiting on Apple to approve it. | |
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