Facebook shares sink further – Facebook shares closed at $19.05 today, dropping more than 4 percent as the lock-out period ended and large investors were able to begin selling their shares. The number of shares available for trading increased 60 … Continue reading →
Facebook today announced that subscription payments are now available to all developers with apps on the site. The company originally announced the program in beta with Zynga, Playdom and Kixeye as partners in June. Now any developer can offer subscriptions for … Continue reading →
Online gambling company Gamesys today launches Bingo Friendzy for Facebook, the first casino title to incorporate real-money play on the social network. Real-money gambling is illegal in the U.S., but if Facebook allows more of these games in other countries, … Continue reading →
Facebook today announced that it has launched a payments reporting API to allow developers to download daily reports of transaction data, instead of receiving that information through email. Facebook says the new system, which is available beginning today, will be more … Continue reading →
Mobile payment service LevelUp, an off-shoot of Boston-based SCVNGR, announced this morning that it has raised $9 million from T-Venture, the venture capital arm of Deutsche Telekom. The investment is the second tranche of a larger funding round and brings the total raised to just over $21 million. SCVNGR itself has raised over $31 million. As a result of the investment, T-Venture Senior Manager Randeep Wilkhu will join the startup’s board as an observer.
As for some context: Every day there’s a new headline about mobile payments solutions. It seems that every carrier and credit card company has its own system, while all the big mobile players are working on one or have one already on the market (Google Wallet). The rumors indicate that the iPhone 5 will have NFC functionality to enable Apple’s entry into the mobile payments game. The point is: It’s easy to be skeptical of new solutions, especially when it comes to long-term viability.
Ready to enter a cardless future but not quite sure about NFC? The Protean Echo might be for you. This clever project essentially captures your credit cards onto one multi-purpose card that can hold up to three cards at a time.
It works like this: you scan your magnetic stripe cards into a smartphone app using a supplied dongle. You can then “upload” three cards to the Protean Echo and select them by tapping one of three touch-sensitive spots. The Echo’s batteries last for 2 years and you can store as many cards as you want on your phone.
CardSpring, an ambitious payments startup founded by former Netscape engineers, is building a platform that connects web and mobile applications to payment cards. It’s a card-linked payment infrastructure that can work across any bank or card type (Visa, MasterCard, Discover, AmEx, etc.), because it sits in the cloud, and is attached to the payments network directly. This enables developers to build card-linked applications that trigger when a consumer pays by credit or debit card, whether it’s an app delivering coupons, offers, loyalty points, frequent flier miles, recommendations, or more.
Now, the startup is taking a big step in terms of making this all happen, as it has partnered with the First Data payments network, the largest payment processor in the U.S., reaching over 4 million merchant locations, and accounting for over half of the U.S.’s payment infrastructure. Also new, CardSpring has added a handful of big-name strategic investors who cover every aspect of its business: API franchises, online advertising, big data, and finance.
More users are accessing Facebook from their phones than ever before, but during Thursday’s earnings call the company blamed a slowdown in both payments and ad sales on the shift to mobile. Facebook’s revenues from payments increased by a scant … Continue reading →
Openbucks, a startup creating a gift card-based payment network (and a former TechCrunch Disrupt finalist), is announcing today it has closed $4.8 million in Series A funding, in a round led by Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. Also participating were Terry Semel, Greycroft Partners, BV Capital, Clearstone Ventures, Morado Ventures, Novel TMT Ventures, Inspiration Ventures, CrunchFund, SV Angel and TiE Angels. (Whew!).
Since its initial debut, founder and CEO Marc Rochman says Openbucks has grown to “tens of thousands of users” and has seen “hundreds of thousands” of transactions on its network.
Mobile payments platform Dwolla has the potential to disrupt how money moves in the new, digital economy. It’s an idea of how a payments network should look, if one had been built today, as opposed to tacking on digital payments to the legacy system that is the current credit card network. But there has been one big problem for end users of Dwolla – no one had any clue where they could actually try the darned thing. That’s going to change starting today with the launch of Dwolla “Places.”
