After launching in Sweden in November and recently expanding its presence in Europe, Wrapp, the Swedish social gifting start-up, is now coming to the U.S. to tap America’s love of gift cards. The start-up is partnering with a number of brands including Gap, H&M and Sephora. Read more »
TheFind, a shopping search site with a trove of product data, is going after Pinterest with the launch of Glimpse, a new Facebook shopping discovery app that curates shopping pages for users based on their likes, as well the stuff their friends like. Read more »
Intuit is plunking down $423.5 million for software firm Demandforce, in a bid to build out its services for small and medium-sized businesses. The deal provides Intuit with an automated marketing and customer communications offering that complements its existing business and accounting software. Read more »
Casual food restaurant chain T.G.I. Fridays has become the first national chain to incorporate mobile payment option Tabbedout, which will allow diners to open a tab and pay their bill right from their smartphone. Read more »
Facebook’s $1 billion blockbuster deal for Instagram may have been motivated by a desire to keep Instagram out of Twitter’s hands. Twitter reportedly offered hundreds of million dollars for Instagram, which prompted Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg to offer a better deal. Read more »
The NHL is jumping further into the second screen trend with what it calls the first predictive gaming app for a major sport league. The free NHL PrePlay app allows TV viewers to play along with a game by making live predictions on the action. Read more »
For many people without a credit or debit card, it has been hard to make online purchases from Walmart.com. Now, the retailer is taking a big step to address this audience by accepting cash payments for online goods, letting people come into the stores to pay. Read more »
Zedge, a popular personalization app that offers ringtones and wallpapers, is looking to use all the data it has on user tastes to help recommend free Android gaming apps via a new Mobile Games Channel on its Zedge app. Read more »
Even with the threat of PayPal looming, Square is seeing no slow down. The company told Bloomberg Wednesday that its annualized rate of processed transactions is now up to $5 billion, up from $4 billion a month ago Read more »
On Wednesday at the Entepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator Demo Day in New York, three start-ups showed off some cool ideas on how to tackle social commerce and let brands and companies start to make some real money from social. Read more »
PayNearMe, a cash payment system that lets users pay for online purchases, bills and bus tickets at 7-Eleven stores, is now offering a fully mobile payment option. Users who don’t have a card can complete their purchases without having to print out anything. Read more »
Striiv, a smart pedometer that uses game mechanics to motivate people, is getting updated Wednesday with a new personal wireless connection that lets users encourage and compete with each other. Striiv is moving beyond a more solo experience and utilizing relationships to further motivate users. Read more »
Sybase 365, one of the largest providers of SMS and MMS messaging, is getting into the push notification business through a partnership with Urban Airship. Sybase 365 will be able to offer enterprise customers app-based push messaging that should help them continue to engage their consumers. Read more »
Aaron Levie, founder and CEO of Box, said even with the long-awaited arrival of Google Drive, he still doesn’t see Google as a competitor. That’s because he sees Box as more of a collaboration platform that happens to have storage making Microsoft more of a rival. Read more »
The details are still fuzzy on the new stealth video startup Planet Daily Networks, founded by Huffington Post co-founder Ken Lerer and former CEO Eric Hippeau, but it appears that the company has nabbed $5 million in funding. Read more »
While Facebook commerce has been a dud, 8thBridge believes there is a future in f-Commerce, though it means rethinking the role Facebook plays in it. The company unveiled a new new social commerce platform on Tuesday, that doesn’t rely on steering shoppers to Facebook stores. Read more »
Chirpify, a payment platform that uses Twitter to conduct transactions, announced it has raised $1.3 million in a Series A round and is finding good traction from Fortune 500 companies. It is also expanding the platform to include the sale of digital goods. Read more »
Boston rail commuters will soon have the ability to use their smartphones to buy and display their train tickets. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority will launch the U.S.’s first smartphone rail ticketing system this fall through a partnership with London-based Masabi. Read more »
Care.com, the Reid Hoffman-backed care giver service, is taking its first international leap, bringing its services to the UK. The six-year-old Waltham, MA-based company has built an international platform and plans on expanding to several other countries this year. Read more »
NimbleTV, a New York start-up, is looking to make good on the promise of TV Everywhere by offering an online TV platform that allows a customer of a paid TV subscription plan to get their content streamed to them wherever they are. Read more »
The smartphone of tomorrow may give you the ability to have X-ray vision. That’s the implications of a breakthrough at the University of Texas, Dallas, where researchers are a big step closer to enabling a phone to see through wood, walls, plastics and other objects. Read more »
New York’s start-up community relived its fondest science fair memories Thursday with the inaugural NY Tech Day, a showcase for 180 start-ups that demonstrated some of the breadth and depth of the local tech scene. The event packed in more than 4,500 attendees. Read more »
Perhaps not surprising for a telephone operator, AT&T has some cool stuff in the works around speech. The company showed off some of its newest stuff out its AT&T Labs Thursday and some of the biggest news was around the work being done in voice-related technologies. Read more »
Eric Migicovsky, the man behind the Pebble watch, is not simply interested in the money he’s raising from his record-setting Kickstarter campaign. He’s more interested in how it’s helping create an ecosystem around Pebble’s app platform, which will support developers and make the watch more useful. Read more »
Tumblr is finally ready to start opening the doors to brands and will begin with a new tool for placing branded Tumblr posts into its Radar feature starting May 2, said Tumblr founder David Karp, speaking at the Ad Age Digital Conference. Read more »
Spotify is partnering with Coca Cola in a deal that it says will expand its international reach, giving it a boost similar to the way Facebook integration has supercharged usage. Coke will use Spotify to power its music outreach and will help promote the service internationally. Read more »
Pinterest-like discovery site Fancy rolled out a new social commerce platform in February, letting brands and retailers sign up to be a seller on any item that’s been fancied on the site. That has helped Fancy double its user base to 500,000 users. Read more »
Jonah Peretti, BuzzFeed’s co-founder, spoke at Ad Age’s Digital Conference and talked about how it’s helping usher in the transition from search to social. He said the new standard in advertising is ads that are engaging and are ripe for sharing. Read more »
Hulu Plus, Hulu’s paid subscription service, has hit 2 million users and is helping put the company’s revenue on a faster pace than last year, said Hulu’s CEO Jason Kilar, speaking at the Ad Age Digital conference in New York. Read more »
For many women, the closet can become a place for outfits they no longer wear, crowding out room for items they’d like to buy. Threadflip, a new social marketplace for clothing, is launching today to help address that dilemma. Read more »
While most developers won’t see a big Instagram-like exit for their apps, they are gaining a new way to make money from their apps by selling them on Apptopia, a new marketplace for developers. The service launched online last week. Read more »
Twigmore, a social travel service built on Facebook, is pivoting into more of a global friend-finding service as it builds off the success of a standalone hit feature. It’s the latest example of services finding that a focus on social travel may not be enough to survive. Read more »
Facebook confirmed that it has acquired customer loyalty service Tagtile, which helps merchants distribute rewards, offers and coupons to in-store customers via their phones. The deal follows the acquisition of Instragram this week and it shows that Facebook is looking at shoring up its mobile needs. Read more »
Rovio, Uber, Fab.com, Airbnb share a common thread: their payments are powered by Braintree, which has become a force in the online commerce world. The company is now processing $4 billion annually and is on pace to break $1 billion for mobile in the next month. Read more »
Tumblr CEO David Karp said the company is looking to make its mark by enabling creators to express themselves. It’s also in a bid to start monetizing the service. But Karp believes these two goals can converge, with Tumblr making money by empowering creators. Read more »
After suffering a rare miss last quarter, Google came back with a solid quarter with earnings coming in at $10.08 a share, on revenue of $10.65 billion. The company also announced a stock-split proposal that will create a new class of non-voting capital stock. Read more »
An investment fund of J.P. Morgan is paying $100 million for a 7 percent stake of online and mobile engagement tool maker Conduit, which is now valued at $1.3 billion. Conduit says it’s the first $1 billion Israeli Internet company. Read more »
For the local small business or artist building up a Facebook fan page, creating a mobile optimized web app can be another hurdle or headache. But why not combine the two efforts? That’s the premise behind a new product called Fan Page Mobilizer. Read more »
BiddingForGood, a sort of eBay for non-profit online auctions, is launching a new technology called Smart Bidding that will bring its auction services into physical locations for the first time, enabling organizations to use mobile devices to jazz up traditional silent auctions and expand their reach. Read more »
Point Inside is looking to tap the power of indoor location with the launch nSide, a new private indoor ad network for retailers.
Retailers will be able to send targeted ad messages based on a user’s location within a store, their shopping route and shopping lists. Read more »
