While Google-backed Corduro may have looked like a Square competitor at first, it’s shooting for bigger clients. It signed up a hospital and a university earlier this year and plans to keep going after big enterprise customers while still making its services available to merchants. Read more »
Crittercism, which just raised $5.5 million last month, is beefing up its toolset for mobile developers with the ability to handle real-time dynamic alerts for application performance management. And it’s now also providing support for apps written with the Android NDK. Read more »
Vyclone, a new iOS app, lets people record video and contribute it to a single movie that incorporates multiple angles. Users can create a movie automatically from various cameras in one place or they can edit the footage themselves. Read more »
Foursquare is building out its merchant services by adding a new tool called Local Update that allows businesses to reach loyal customers nearby with news and updates. This is part of an effort to make Foursquare’s business tools valuable enough that merchants will pay for it. Read more »
The Twist app for iOS helps you share your estimated time of arrival with friends and colleagues, so they’re current on when they should expect you. The app uses your location and current traffic data to communicate an accurate arrival time. Read more »
Location data provider Skyhook has an update to its mobile SDK for Android that will provide persistant background location tracking with no or negligible impact on battery life. That could be a big help for location-based apps that have suffered because of battery constraints. Read more »
M-Via’s Boom service debuted last year with the goal of restructuring the way people send money to their home countries. M-Via is now getting a big endorsement from mobile operator Digicel Group, which is leading a $17 million round in the newly renamed Boom Financial. Read more »
PayPal liked Card.io so much, it not only used the startup to help it capture credit card images for its PayPal Here product, it is now buying the San Francisco startup. The team will help PayPal build out its digital wallet. Read more »
Square’s list of big name competitors is officially getting another billion dollar company. NCR Corp., the Duluth, GA maker of cash registers and ATM machines, is now launching NCR Silver, a cloud-based point of sale product aimed at small businesses. Read more »
Smule, the music app maker behind I am T-Pain, Songify, Glee and LaDiDa, is now venturing into rapping with the release of AutoRap. The app, launching on both iOS and Android, takes spoken words and turns into a polished rap with cool hooks and effects. Read more »
Socialcam, the popular though sometimes spammy video sharing app, is taking its services to Autodesk, which bought the small startup for $60 million. Autodesk, known for its design software, expects to close the deal in the third quarter is reportedly set on keeping Socialcam independent. Read more »
Kiip, a mobile reward network, announced it has raised $11 million as it looks to become more of a consumer-facing company. The startup will release a wallet app called Kiipsake that will let users organize and manage their rewards. Read more »
Yahoo’s drawn-out search for a CEO has taken an unexpected turn with the company stealing away Marissa Mayer, Google’s first female engineer and the head of its location and local services, as its new chief Yahoo. Mayer takes over as president and CEO Tuesday. Read more at paidContent »
Dalton Caldwell, the man behind failed startups Imeem and PicPlz, recently ruminated on what Twitter could have been. Now, he’s moving ahead with his own paid alternative called App.net that promises to shun advertising and focus on customer trust. Read more »
Qualcomm, which normally works with manufacturers, is taking a page from Intel and trying to sell developers and ultimately consumers on the benefits of its chips. With a new Snapdragon SDK for Android, Qualcomm thinks it can be the go-to name for devs and consumers. Read more »
Isis, the carrier-led mobile payment venture by Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, is preparing for its big summer debut with the release of a series of video tutorials aimed at educating users on how to use its tap-and-go system. Read more »
LevelUp, a Boston-based loyalty and payment startup, is laying down the gauntlet to other payment competitors by doing away with processing fees forever in what it calls a bid to achieve “Interchange Zero.” It will only make money from selling offers and loyalty services. Read more »
Twilio, a cloud communication platform, is finally offering its most requested feature: global SMS support. Now, developers will be able to enable their apps and services to send and receive SMS text messages from the U.S. and Canada to more than 150 countries around the world. Read more »
GE’s long awaited WattStation electric vehicle charging stations will rely on PayPal as the exclusive payment provider, the two companies told GigaOM. PayPal will be embedded in the WattStation Connect mobile app and will also soon power an RFID payment card. Read more »
Payphones, those relics of the pre-cellphone era, may just get a new lease on life in New York. The city is testing a new pilot program in which it installs free Wi-Fi on select payphone kiosks. It is starting with ten kiosks in three boroughs. Read more »
The mobile backend as a service market continues to heat up as more developers look to connect their apps to various services and make them more dynamic. That’s prompting more money for startups such like Kinvey, which is announcing that it has raised $5 million. Read more »
Amazon is getting more serious about gaming on the Kindle Fire with the introduction of GameCircle, a social engagement layer for developers who want to add achievements, leaderboards and cloud syncing to their games. The service is Amazon’s answer to Apple’s Game Center. Read more »
Stripe, which launched its service less than ten months ago, is now valued at hundreds of millions of dollars after a new funding round of $20 million. The company has built a big following with its simple payment platform that lets developers easily add payment services. Read more »
Glimpse, a new Pinterest-like application powered by Facebook Likes, is now making the ubiquitous “Like” button a lot more useful by tying universal price alerts to it. Users who like a product can receive an email alert when it goes on sale. Read more »
GroupMe is looking beyond messaging with the introduction of Experiences by GroupMe, a new group event planning service that is launching in New York City. It’s part of GroupMe’s larger plan to influence local spending and get a piece of the local ad and offers market. Read more »
Paydiant is announcing $12 million in Series B funding led by Stage 1 Ventures, which will go toward the build out of its white-label payment and offers platform for banks and retailers. The company enables banks and merchants to add mobile payment services into existing apps. Read more »
The next breakout Kickstarter project may emerge outside the U.S. for the first time now that the popular crowd-funding site is preparing to expand overseas. The start-up announced on Twitter that people in the UK will be able to launch projects starting this fall. Read more »
Betable, a UK-based startup, is introducing a platform that allows developers to easily add real-money gaming into their apps. The company is announcing a private beta developer program and plans to open the platform to all developers before the end of this year. Read more »
Kayak, which first filed to go public back in November of 2010, is back on track with its IPO. The company updated its S-1 Monday saying it is looking to raise up to $100.6 million after pricing its IPO between $22 and $25 per share. Read more »
Social travel startup Tripl, part of the latest DreamIt Ventures NY accelerator class, has built a personalized filtering service that ingests your friends’ Facebook and Foursquare feeds and organizes their travel data into stories on a timeline, so you can see where your friends are visiting. Read more »
KakaoTalk, a messaging and VoIP app, has been growing at a breakneck pace with 38 million registered accounts in Korea, its home market. In response, the leading carriers have worked to make life difficult for KakaoTalk and similar apps, blocking and throttling service for these apps. Read more »
Amazon is in the business of selling stuff, traditionally online but more recently in the form of a tablet, the Kindle Fire. Now, it’s reportedly looking at expanding to smartphones. Here’s a look at why and how Amazon might be able to pull it off. Read more »
YBuy, a Southern California company, has built a monthly subscription service around the try-before-you-buy model for gadgets, appliances and other products and it’s getting a big name backer in Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, whose TomorrowVentures is leading a $1 million Series A round. Read more »
The latest rage in mobile social apps are private networks built for couples. But are lovers eager to commit their lives to each other through an app? Between, a couples app, thinks so. It just hit the 1 million download mark after launching in November. Read more »
As a hot, buzzy start-up in private beta, Branch has enjoyed advanced hype thanks to some high profile users and backers. But it also suffers from misconceptions as well because it’s not quite clear to the public what it will be. Is it a form of a […] Read more »
Pike Research, in a new report, forecasts the wireless market to triple in size from $4.9 billion in 2012 to $15.1 billion in 2020. And that’s not considering the impact of Apple, which just received a patent for an inductive charging dock late last month. Read more »
MasterCard and Deutsche Telekom announced a partnership today that will bring NFC contactless payments to DT’s 93 million mobile customers in Europe. That puts more momentum behind NFC payments and potentially sets up 2013 as a big break-out year for contactless payments. Read more »
Sony Computer Entertainment’s $380 million acquisition of cloud gaming provider Gaikai suggests Sony’s future may not be in any piece of proprietary hardware but in a cloud delivery platform that brings PlayStation games to any connected device. Read more »
Getting feedback on decisions isn’t always easy as it sounds, especially when it involves visual options or more in depth questions. That’s a problem that former AdMob founder and CEO Omar Hamoui is trying to target with his new startup Maybe. Read more »
Monetate, which analyzed more than 100 million online shopping experiences, said that in the first quarter of 2012, tablet traffic to commerce sites hit 6.52 percent, overtaking smartphones (5.35 percent) for the first time. Tablets are already ideal shopping devices and they’re only growing in popularity. Read more »
