FutureAdvisor raised $5 million from Sequoia, Keith Rabois and Jeremy Stoppelman to build out its personal finance advising service. The Seattle company makes it easy to get tips on how to reduce fees and taxes, diversify your portfolio and achieve your financial goals. Read more »
CouchSurfing, a former non-profit that helps travelers find a place to stay, has raised a $15 million Series B round, led by General Catalyst Partners. The money comes a year after it raised $7.6 million and incorporated with a B Corp certification. Read more »
Yext earlier this year started pivoting away from its pay-per-call product in favor of its PowerListings business, which syncs local business information online for customers. Now, it’s making the bet on PowerListings official by selling its Felix pay-per-call unit to IAC’s CityGrid Media. Read more »
VeriFone’s Square competitor SAIL is showing the first integration with a third-party service. It is working with Stitch Labs to offer customers a way to merge online and offline inventory management. The integration demonstrates how SAIL will compete by being open to outside services. Read more »
David Tisch, the managing director of TechStars New York, is stepping away from his duties to pursue new projects. He will remain active with the accelerator program. His replacement has not been announced yet. Read more »
The fate of cloud-gaming pioneer OnLive is in question following a report that most of the staff was laid off and the service was closing. The company has denied those reports but hasn’t provided further details. Read more »
Braintree, a payment processing company that serves Rovio, Uber, Fab.com and Airbnb, is paying $26.2 million to buy mobile payment startup Venmo. The deal will allow Braintree to expand on mobile payments, the fastest growing part of its business. Read more »
Mobile payment startup Square is giving small businesses an option to pay a monthly transaction fee of $275 instead of paying $2.75 per card swipe. That will save money for businesses who do more volume and will give them more predictability about their costs. Read more »
Dunkin Donuts’ first mobile app is debuting Thursday and it’s offering a way for people to pay via their iPhone or Android device. It works similar to one used by Starbucks, which has had a lot of success since it launched mobile payments. Read more »
Goko, a new HTML5 game platform, is giving developers a way to create, distribute and monetize their games across multiple platforms. The company is showcasing the platform with two new titles: Dominion and Catan World. Read more »
The mobile payment market is getting even more crowded thanks to a big play by a consortium of retailers including Target, Walmart, Sears and others who are creating their own mobile wallet. The move will give them a chance to save costs and protect their data. Read more »
Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures is leading a $2 million Series A round in biNu, an Australian startup that enables feature phones to run cloud-based smartphone apps such as Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and Google. BiNu highlights the opportunity in developing markets where smartphone penetration is low. Read more »
Location-based advertising holds a lot of potential to boost mobile monetization by offering more relevant and contextual ads. JiWire is trying boost location-based ads with Location Graph, which combines place data with the travel patterns of consumers. Read more »
Facebook is now encouraging expectant parents to memorialize the moment by introducing a new life event for Timeline called “Expecting a baby.” The move, however, goes too far in getting people to share about things in the future out of their control. Read more »
After lining up some big backers including two Twitter founders, communications hub Branch is opening to the public. The service is trying to encourage online dialogues by drawing people into conversations that can be shared and preserved. Read more »
Google’s move to buy travel publisher Frommer’s highlights how local and travel are coming together. Increasingly, the best travel services are focused on treating you like a local. And local services are becoming great resources for people looking to spend time in an unfamiliar city. Read more »
Getting productivity apps in a bring-your-own-device age is getting easier with the release of InstallFree Nexus, which allows users to access Microsoft Office, Adobe Reader and other apps from any browser without the need for a client or app download. Read more »
Developers are getting another Siri-like tool to embed speech-enabled virtual assistants in their apps. Lexee, a new product from interactive voice response provider Angel, offers an SDK for iOS and Android users. Lexee has a point and click system for building conversation flows and user analytics. Read more »
The restructuring process under Google has begun at Motorola, which will reduce its head count by 20 percent or 4,000 jobs this year. The company is slimming down its operations in an attempt to compete with smartphone leaders Apple and Samsung. Read more »
Retailers are looking increasingly to social networks to bring in customers and ultimately drive more sales. But data from online marketing provider Monetate show that social still lags email and search in sales conversions and average purchase amounts. Read more »
Some of the biggest players in the mobile payment space including the four U.S. mobile carriers, Google, Isis, VeriFone and Intuit are joining a new mobile payment committee within the Electronic Transactions Association. It’s still too early to say what this cooperation will yield. Read more »
The Google Translate app is taking on the ability to handle translations of pictured text. It’s a feature that first appeared in Google Goggles, but it now allows users to highlight which text they want to translate by running their fingers over specific words. Read more »
Starbucks has seen the power of mobile payments first hand but isn’t prepared to expand its own payment efforts. But it is making a big $25 million bet on Square to be a leader in this fast growing space. Read more »
Facebook is turning on mobile ads for apps, allowing developers to target users in their news feed with ads about their software. This will likely generate new revenue for Facebook and help developers. But it remains to be seen how users will react. Read more »
The line-up of Square rivals just got a bit longer today with the debut of GoPago Live, a mobile payment service for small businesses. GoPago’s twist is that its offering software and a tablet with 4G wireless, a receipt printer and cash drawer, all for free. Read more »
Circa, the stealthy mobile news startup from Cheezburger’s Ben Huh and SimpleGeo’s Matt Galligan, is trying to build a news application that is native to smartphone and tablet users. In a video interview, Huh explains what’s wrong with news today and how it needs to change. Read more at paidContent »
Inneractive, which runs a mobile ad exchange, has just raised $3.5 million to help developers make money from their apps. The company helps developers by connecting their apps to its exchange, which includes more than 120 ad providers working in more than 200 countries. Read more »
Ouya, a $99 Android-based video game console, has picked up more than $5 million in the biggest Kickstarter campaign to date. It’s also received plenty of doubts from skeptics as well. In an interview, Julie Uhrman, the CEO and founder, said Ouya is the real deal. Read more »
UPDATED: NFC reader and software maker ViVOtech is selling off its reader business as it restructures and focuses on software. The company, which has raised $96 million to date, may have burned through too much cash waiting for NFC payments to materialize. Read more »
Three months after launching, Apptopia, which allows developers to sell their entire app, is doing solid business facilitating a growing number of sales. And that attracted the attention of investors including Mark Cuban, who is putting in half of Apptopia’s $1 million seed round. Read more »
SafePay Solutions Group is launching a tool in the U.S. and Canada for merchants and consumers that uses a smartphone to verify online purchases. Users who sign up will get the chance to confirm all online purchases using their cards at registered SafePay registered retailers. Read more »
Flurry, which has helped developers measure and monetize their mobile apps, is now poised to help them build their apps too. The company announced it has bought Seattle-based Trestle, a provider of mobile backend services, and will offer a set of cloud services for developers. Read more »
Location-based social network Foursquare is rolling out its long awaited promoted updates, an advertising product that allows local and national businesses to push out specials, news and pictures to Foursquare’s more than 20 million users. It’s the start of Foursquare’s big monetization push. Read more »
AT&T has been reducing the number and length of calls to its call centers by relying on so-called smart videos from New York City-based SundaySky. The videos are personalized tutorials that are built on the fly using pre-scripted clips mixed with the subscriber’s own data. Read more »
Pontiflex, which offers small businesses a way to run their own mobile sign-up ads, is now following that up with Social FollowUp, a free tool that enables merchants to automatically send out emails that are algorithmically built from their social media updates and content. Read more »
San Francisco startup NextDoor launched nine months ago with its Facebook for neighborhoods idea. And now the startup is getting a big endorsement in the form of $18.6 million in new funding to pursue this market, which is turning out to be a promising opportunity. Read more »
Viber, the hot VoIP and messaging app, has just hit 90 million users, adding 20 million of them in the last two months. Now, it’s adding group messaging and an HD Voice engine, which should just encourage users to send more messages and make more calls. Read more »
New York City-based Mobli gets mentioned in the same breath as Instagram and a raft of social video competitors like Socialcam and Viddy. But it’s got a bigger goal: it want be a “visual platform” where users can find timely images on anything in the world. Read more »
Getting workers to better collaborate together is becoming a hot opportunity. Asana, started by former Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskowitz, just raised $28 million led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. The company helps workers communicate around projects and helps them act quickly. Read more »
Who says the IPO window is shut: successful public offerings by online travel company Kayak and networking software company Palo Alto Networks shows that investors will open their checkbooks as long as the companies have real business prospects. Both stocks ended their first day flying high. Read more »
