Thursday, January 19, 2012

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Former Google CIO Raises $73 Million To Reform Payday Loans With Data-Driven Startup ZestCash Top
zestcash-pictureZestCash, a company founded by former Google CIO and VP of engineering Douglas Merrill to legitimize the payday loan industry, has raised $73 million round of funding. The company raised $23 million in an equity round led by Matrix Partners. Existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners, GRP Partners, Flybridge Capital Partners, and Lighthouse Capital Partners also fully participated in the round. The company also raised a separate $50 million line of debt financing from Victory Park Capital to fund its loan portfolio. ZestCash takes an entirely different approach to underwriting by combining Google-style machine learning techniques and data analysis, combined with traditional credit scoring. As a result, the company can offer credit to many people who historically would have been turned away.
 
BigCommerce Establishes $2 Million Fund For Developers Top
bigcommerceExclusive - E-commerce platform company BigCommerce has set up a $2 million fund for developers. With the launch of the fund, the Sydney, Australia-based company aims to sway third-party developers into submitting their integration and application ideas. Caveat: investments in successful entries are capped at $20,000 per project.
 
Hey Tagged, Badoo Has Been Around As Long And Has Bigger Revenues Top
balance_180x180As a social network aimed at helping you meet new people - don't mention the phrase 'hooking up' - Tagged's vice president of sales and marketing Steve Sarner claims other companies are only now catching onto 'social discovery' and the site is "by far the largest" in the social discovery space. Ex-squeeze me? I'm afraid we'll have to balance this, and perhaps educate Mr Sarner a little, in case he hasn't heard of a little site called Badoo.
 
Failure Is An Option: 7 Businesses That Tanked In 2011 (Slides) Top
About a year ago, my pal Nick De Mey from Board of Innovation shared a great slidedeck about the 10 business models that rocked 2010. This year, the Board identified 7 business models that failed in 2011 (Slideshare link).
 
Calling All Entrepreneurs: Twilio Expands APIs To 6 European Nations Top
Twilio EuropeA new wave of European entrepreneurs are about to start revolutionizing how we use our phones. Today, the Twilio voice API becomes available in Austria, Denmark, France, Ireland and Poland. Additionally, Twilio's SMS API now supports UK phone numbers. These APIs allow developers to build apps that can programatically send and receive calls and texts.
 
Constant Contact Buys Mobile Loyalty Card Startup CardStar Top
CardStarEmail marketing company Constant Contact has acquired CardStar, a digital and mobile loyalty card platform. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. CardStar, which has over two million users, allows users to consolidate membership and rewards cards on smartphones, letting consumers use a single application rather than carrying around a series of physical cards. Consumers simply scan the cards and their accounts and information is then imported into the app. Merchants can then track consumer behavior.
 
Capsule Wants To Be Your One Stop Shop For (Private) Events Top
Screen Shot 2012-01-18 at 7.39.08 PMEvents management startup Capsule describes itself as a little bit of Path, Color, Evite and GroupMe, but also none of those things according to co-founders Cyrus Farudi and Omri Cohen. From what I can tell, the startup is attempting to fix the beleaguered events space, which is basically something which could be totally amazing if Facebook separated its Events vertical into a separate "Messenger" type app. Oh Lord please do this.
 
Oops – Sony Ericsson Swings To A 207 Million Euro Net Loss In Q4 2011 Top
sonySmartphone maker Sony Ericsson this morning posted a pre-tax loss of 247 million euros ($318 million) in the fourth quarter of 2011, after reporting a profit of 31 million euros in Q3 2011. The company, a 50:50 joint-venture between Sony and Ericsson, blames "intense competition", "price erosion" and effects from the flooding in Thailand as some of the main drivers for the drop. Sales for the quarter were approximately 1.3 billion euros, down 16 percent year-on-year.
 
Ticketmaster's New Facebook App Recommends Concerts From Your Listening Activity Top
Facebook Ticketmaster RecommendationsOf all the new Open Graph apps launched tonight, Ticketmaster's new Facebook experience is the most impressive. Sure it can share that you've "bought" tickets, but lots of apps have similar publishing functionality. What makes Ticketmaster's app cool is that it pulls your Facebook profile's music app activity from services such as Spotify or Rdio, and recommends nearby concerts of artists you actually listen to, not just those you say you Like.
 
Google Fiber-Inspired Gigabit Challenge Unveils Winners; Senator Announces STOP SOPA Petition Top
11682643-logoBack in 2010, Google announced plans to build out a fiber-optic network for an entire city in the U.S., promising connection speeds of 1GB/sec, 100 times that of the norm. Naturally, over 1,000 cities applied. But only one could claim the prize, and that one was Kansas City.
 
OrcaM "Reconstruction Sphere" Digitally Recreates Any Object Placed Within Top
OrcaM_UntenOccasionally, in this line of work, I need to have a slight freak-out moment where I rave about the fact that things like this OrcaM "reconstruction sphere" actually exist. Not only does this thing look like a prop out of a sci-fi movie (or Transmetropolitan), but it acts like one as well.
 
TCTV: Live At SF vs SOPA, The Biggest Tech Protest In Decades Top
When you hear the words "San Francisco," there's a good chance that the word "protest" will also come to mind. Or, if you're on a different wavelength, "Ron Conway." But today, the city's favorite pasttime and its top angel investor came together at a special appearance in Civic Center Plaza to speak out against SOPA and PIPA, the two slimy "anti-piracy" bills currently worming their ways through through Congress.
 
Google Collected 4.5 Million Anti-SOPA Signatures Today Top
goog2Google generally gets in hot water when it is thought to be abusing its pole position in the search industry. But it's no use denying that while some moves skirt the edges of abusing monopoly, others are more than welcome. During natural disasters, for instance, Google has provided helpful links and resources for people who want to donate or volunteer. And their logo doodles pay homage to personages and events many people would otherwise have overlooked. Today must rank among the best applications of their choice placement: a link on the Google homepage and thousands of shares have produced a mind-blowing 4.5 million signatures on their anti-SOPA petition.
 
There Were More Than 2.4M Tweets About SOPA Today Top
twitterToday was the internet's big protest day against SOPA and PIPA, and not surprisingly, there was plenty of discussion about the issue on Twitter. Specifically, the company tweeted that that there were more than 2.4 million SOPA-related tweets between midnight and 4pm Eastern time.
 
Brass Monkey Grabs $750K To Turn Your Smartphone Into A Wii Controller For Browser Games Top
Screen shot 2012-01-18 at 5.39.39 PMSix months ago, Brass Monkey had built and released some well-developed software development kits (SDKs) for Android, iOS, and beyond that, simply put, enabled gamers to turn their mobile devices into remote controllers, with support for Flash, Unity3D, and desktop games and apps. The Brass Monkey team, CEO Chris Allen tells us, believed that bringing the functionality of a Wii controller to smart devices was something gamers could get excited about -- but, at the time, they were missing one important piece. Support that would allow gamers to play on the browser. So they went about acq-hiring Emotely and its Founder and CEO Francois Laberge, bringing him on as CTO.
 
Facebook's New Timeline Apps Introduce New Actions Like "Bought," "Want" And "Love" Top
332875_10150509372423553_19292868552_8892424_408061749_oFacebook has partnered up with sixty different startups to add their "stories" to Facebook Timeline, through apps that span different verticals from Food, Fashion to Travel. Already apps like Fab.com, Foodspotting, Foodily, Ticketmaster, Pinterest,Rotten Tomatoes, Pose, Kobo, Gogobot, and TripAdvisor have signed on to share these stories -- which go beyond what we're used to on Facebook.
 
Pinterest and 60 Others Demo Open Graph Sites + Apps That Auto-Publish To Facebook Top
Open Graph AppsFacebook's Open Graph app launch event is underway here in San Francisco, where over 60 new Open Graph websites and apps are either demo-ing or launching remotely. The apps can publish user activity back to Timeline and Ticker, even from offsite. Launch partners include Pinterest, Ticketmaster, Gogobot, Rotten Tomatoes, and many others. Carl Sjogreen, Facebook project manager, also announced that Facebook will now begin approving apps from third-party developers who aren't partners.
 
Foursquare Adds Restaurant Menus, What About Food Check Ins? Top
Pinche-Taqueria-menuLess than a week after unveiling the Explore section of its website, Foursquare announced a nice addition — restaurant menus. Foursquare says it has partnered with startup SinglePlatform to add menus and pricing information for almost 250,000 restaurants in Explore. This seems like a pretty natural addition, and a way to make Explore a viable alternative to a site like Yelp.
 
Ness, The Restaurant Discovery App, Adds Crucial Mapping Feature Top
Screen Shot 2012-01-18 at 4.34.24 PMI made heavy use of Ness's restaurant-finding iOS app during a recent trip through the East Coast, because lots of places are still sadly short on Yelp reviews, and I wanted a quick way to find the best local spots to eat. While I got some good results, I would have been all over a new feature that Ness has just pushed out in an update today: maps. Yeah, another restaurant app with a map. You're not shocked, I'm guessing, but you should take a closer look because of the data that Ness offers. It uses machine learning technology that uses a variety of social signals that you provide it from Facebook, Foursquare and Twitter, as well as your behavior and other data, to figure out which places you'll like the most. The result is often what you're hoping for -- suggestions for great places that you might not have seen on other restaurant discovery apps, or anywhere else for that matter.
 
From Edu To Non-Profits, YouTube Aims To Walk The Path To Good Top
85271v2-max-250x250YouTube may be best known for its viral sensations, lawn gnomes, and feline shenanigans, but the site's massive collection of content has given rise to plenty of more benevolent — and, some might say important — trends. Like helping non-profits including charity:water harness the power of video to connect to millions of viewers. And serving up lectures from major universities, opening the doors of learning to remote villages hundreds of miles away from the nearest school. In short, YouTube has done a lot of good so far. And it's hoping to do a lot more. Hunter Walk, a long-time Director of Product Management at Google who has steered YouTube's product side for years, recently decided that he wanted to spearhead YouTube's social good efforts. Granted, the role he wanted didn't exactly exist yet, but he managed to convince YouTube chief Salar Kamangar to let him create it. Walks's new, self-appointed mission: Bake 'good' into any part of YouTube he can.
 

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