Tag | credit-card
Product Management Software Company Atlassian Takes A Huge, $60 Million First Round Of Funding From Accel
It is not often that a company’s first round of venture funding comes in at $60 million and eight years after it was founded with $10,000 worth of credit card debt. But Atlassian , which was founded in Sydney, Australia in 2002, is taking its first venture money today from Accel Partners. The company pulled in $59 million in revenues in its fiscal year ended June 30, 2010, and has been “profitable from Year One,” says co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon. The money will be used to give some liquidity to the founders and employees, expand its product portfolio, and possibly acquire other startups. n order to get a return on its minority stake, Accel is expecting Atlassian to one day have a very successful IPO. But he is in no rush. Wong thinks that once the company passes $100 million in revenue, it will be time to start thinking of an IPO. If revenues continue to grow 30 percent a year, that will be only a few years away. Atlassian makes software product development software that is used by 20,000 customers around the world, including Facebook, Zynga, Cisco, and Adobe. “In our belief,” says Accel partner Rich Wong, “these guys are the standard in product development software—20,000 customers can’t be wrong.” Its products include the Jira bug tracker, Confluence wiki and collaboration suite, and a host of software project development tools. Wong compares Atlassian to Salesforce, except without the sales people. Atlassian has 225 employees, but hardly any sales people. The company spreads virally within organizations. “In the same way that Salesforec.com is about streamlining collaboration, this is about streamlining the product development process.” Atlassian offers its products both behind teh firewall on a comapny’s own servers and as a software service, and its pricing is an order of magnitude below what something like IBM’s Rational software would cost. Atlassian’s products bring a familiar interface to enterprise software. “It is a little more modern in thought,” says Cannon, “a bridge between enterprise software and the consumer world.” The interface bring in elements like activity streams and avatars familiar to engineers and product managers from applications like Facebook. CrunchBase Information Atlassian Accel Partners Information provided by CrunchBase
Chicago’s Excelerate Labs Graduates Nine Startups
We recently wrote about the launch of a Y Combinator and TechStars -like startup incubator in Chicago, Excelerate Labs. The program’s nine fledgling startups are set to graduate from the inaugural session of the incubator in a few weeks. Here’s a brief look at the startups that will be graduating from the incubator. FanGo Software Systems : FanGo produces an iPhone app and mobile commerce ordering system that allows fans at stadiums and arenas to order concession food and drinks directly from their iPhone app. Food is then delivered to the fan’s seat, allowing fans to avoid long lines at food stands in stadiums. The startup is already in progress of negotiating deals with professional sports stadiums across the country. Noblivity : Noblivity aims to bring trade shows for small boutiques and manufacturers online. Its online marketplace aims to connect small brands to small specialty stores to order jewelry, clothing, and home goods for their stock. It’s similar in theory to to Etsy, but aims to be more of a B2B platform. PVPower : The startup simplifies the installation of solar power projects by developing a productivity tools for solar installers. The web-based application allows any contractor or installer to source solar panels, learn the best practices for installation and more. Tap Me: Tap Me’s advertising platform iComplishments hopes to bring advertising revenue to game developers with an in-game advertising technology. The technology allows developers to reward gameplay with advertiser branded points and virtual gifts. WeGather : WeGather’s goal is to offer religious institutions a custom based software to create a community website to engage participants. The SaaS platform helps increase donations, improves volunteer participation, centralizes e-communications, and helps create calendars. TransFS : TransFS is a comparison shopping site for credit card processors. The startup aims to help merchants save money on credit card fees and also conducts reverse auctions to solicit competing bids from credit card processing companies. Merchants can then review each proposal and select the bid that saves the most money. EduLender: EduLender, which has yet to launch, is a comparison search engine for student loans. You simply enter your name, location and financial information, and EduLender will show you all of the lenders serving your area that offer student loans, requisite interest rates, and what your loan will cost in real dollars in an apples-to-apples comparison. GiveForward : GiveForward is an online fundraising tool aimed at a niche audience. The platform aims to make it easy for people to raise money for a loved one’s medical expenses. The allows anyone to create customizable fundraising pages where friends and family from across the world can donate online. MathZee : MathZee aims to make learning math more fun for small children. The online platform teaches math via games that utilize audio, visual, and interactive features. CrunchBase Information Excelerate Labs Information provided by CrunchBase
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Chicago’s Excelerate Labs Graduates Nine Startups
UberCab Takes The Hassle Out Of Booking A Car Service
Finding a cab, especially during peak travel times or in less-traveled areas, can be an incredibly frustrating task. But car services are often much more expensive than the average cab ride. Enter UberCab, a new service that offers an on-demand car service via an iPhone app or SMS. After signing up for an UberCab account and downloading the free i Phone app, can then you can then set your location and request a car service from the application. The app will determine your location and you can set your exact pickup location. UberCab will then send your request to their network of drivers who happen to be in the area. The driver will accept your request and you can then input your end location. The driver will alert you when arriving, and once you entire the car, you hit begin trip on your app to begin your fare. The driver also has a connecting app, which he will use to input the end of the trip. At the end of the trip, your pre-set credit card that you input when you set up your account will be charged and you won’t have to dole out any cash. Of course, convenience has a price. You may pay any where from one and a half to two times the price of a cab fare (but two times less than a traditional car service fee). But you are receiving better service, a nice black limo and an on-demand solution. UberCab calculates the cost of your trip based on milage and time in the car, similar to the way other limo companies calculate fares. However, the startup says you are able to get better fares because its drivers perceive these on-demand trips as extra money in addition to their regular full-priced trips to and from the airport. Interestingly, UberCab asks that both passengers and drivers rate each other, Yelp-style. This helps UberCab ensure that passengers and driver are using the system properly. Unfortunately, UberCab is only available in San Francisco (although UberCab’s site says it will also be beta tested in Chicago). That being said, if UberCab were in the city that I live in, Id probably use it. I’d definitely be willing to pay a little extra to ride in a nice car with the convenience of door to door service. And initial reviews from local San Francisco users on Twitter seem fairly positive. UberCab as a technology will compete with Cabulous, which displays cabs in your area, tracking them in real time, and TaxiMagic. UberCab Demo from UberCab on Vimeo . CrunchBase Information UberCab Information provided by CrunchBase
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UberCab Takes The Hassle Out Of Booking A Car Service
Indinero Launches As The Mint.com For Small Businesses
For many small business owners, managing financial health can be an overwhelming process. From credit cards to cash flow to saving, small businesses have many different fiscal elements to consider when monitoring finances. Mint.com helped solved this problem for consumers. And today, Y Combinator -backed startup Indinero is launching its real-time financial dashboard that has a simple ambition: to be the Mint.com for small businesses. Like Mint, Indinero uses Yodlee to allow businesses to transferring bank and credit card account information from financial institutions. But Indinero’s site caters to the financial health and needs of small businesses, breaking out data that addresses cashflow, runway, spending, profits and more. Indinero’s co-founder Jessica Mah tells me that complex accounting software like Intuit’s Quickbooks can often be confusing to navigate. Similar to Mint, Indinero’s interface is simple and easy to use. It makes pretty graphs of a business’ finances to make data trends more understandable. Indinero will soon include a forecasting feature, which will provide businesses an future glimpse into their financial performance based on past data and industry trends. And eventually businesses will be able to compare their performance to other companies of their size and industry focus. The startup doesn’t aim to replace a human bookkeepers, but actually helps business owners collaborate with bookkeepers. Inidinero allows you to import data directly into Quickbooks, saving bookkeepers from the arduous task of inputing data into the program. Indinero of course faces competition from Mint. And there are a number of sites providing simple bookkeeping applications for small businesses including Outright, Freshbooks and others. CrunchBase Information Indinero Information provided by CrunchBase
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Indinero Launches As The Mint.com For Small Businesses
PayPal Launches Mobile Express Checkout To Enable One-Click Buying On Smartphones
eBay has made it fairly clear that mobile is the future for e-commerce. And the numbers only reinforce this strategy- mobile payments are poised to reach $200 billion by 2012, according to Juniper Research. So, of course, eBay is wants to make its crown jewel, PayPal, the leader in the mobile payments space. In fact, PayPal’s mobile transactions have grown as smartphone usage has increased, from $25 million in 2008 to $141 million in 2009. In 2010, PayPal expects more than half a billion dollars in mobile payment volume with more than 5 million members regularly using PayPal from their mobile devices. Today, PayPal is making it easier for merchants and consumers to pay for goods on their smartphones with the launch of Mobile Express Checkout. Mobile Express Checkout is the mobile version of PayPal’s Express Checkout service , which is a one-stop payment option streamlines the checkout process for consumers. A buyer will not have to reenter shipping, billing, or payment information for a PayPal payment, expediting the checkout process. All they need to do is enter their PayPal account login. It’s similar in theory to Amazon’s one click ordering option. Merchant Express Checkout has been optimized for smartphone screens and also features strong fraud detection, says PayPal. Mobile Express Checkout is initially being rolled out on the iPhone and Android 2.0 (and higher) devices by a few retailers, including Nike and Buy.com, over the next few weeks. The technology will eventually become available to all retailers in the next few months. PayPal sees this new mobile technology has an opportunity to allow the company’s 85 million members to easily buy goods on their phones using PayPal’s technology versus inputing a credit card. The company is sure to be on to something with this strategy-inputing your credit card, shipping and billing info on a phone is an arduous and time consuming task. Automating this process is surely the future of mobile payments and shopping. Of course, it’s safe to assume the credit card companies, like Mastercard and Visa, will also be heading down this road soon. CrunchBase Information PayPal eBay Information provided by CrunchBase
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PayPal Launches Mobile Express Checkout To Enable One-Click Buying On Smartphones
Bling Nation Adds A Paypal Option To Cell Phone Payments
Startup Bling Nation has landed a pretty major deal with PayPal, we’ve learned. Bling Nation’s payment systems addresses physical goods in merchant stores and will now allow consumers to use their payment chips to deduct funds from a PayPal account. Here’s how Bling Nation works. The startup partners with banks, who then offer the consumers who use their services a Bling Nation and “Bank” branded chip that can be stuck onto any cell phone device. The chip will allow any user to make a payment directly out of their checking account similar to a debit payment. Bling Nation also partners with all of the local merchants in given town, to give them special “Bling Nation” credit card machines that will scan the chips. The payment device will calculate the number of times a payee has made a transaction and as an added bonus, will automatically award the user with coupons, points or discounts, which the merchant determines. The device will read the chip and deduct the money for a purchase out of the payee’s bank account. Bling Nation even allows merchants to implement a security feature, in which upon purchase, the customer will have to enter a PIN code for larger transactions. With the deal with PayPal, anyone will be use Bling Nation to link a PayPal account and receive tags that they can then stick to their cell phones. You may also be able to enroll during the checkout process as well. And Bling Nation in turn will equip merchants in given areas with payment devices that work with the chip. This is a big win for Bling Nation’s system, which originally had ambitions of solely focusing on hyperlocal banks in small communities. The PayPal integration is currently being tested in Palo Alto and is steadily being rolled out nationally. Most of the work involves distributing the payments devices to local merchants. Enrollment is limited for now, says co-founder Meyer Malka. Consumers can sign up for the service at participating merchants and eventually through the web. The deal also represents a way for consumers to start paying for physical goods, not just online purchases, with their PayPal accounts. Bling Nation recently raised a whopping $20 million in funding to scale its system. Armed with a deal with PayPal, the startup is well on its way to making it into stores nationwide. And PayPal is one step closer to fulfilling its futuristic vision for the payments platform, as shown in this video. CrunchBase Information Bling Nation Information provided by CrunchBase
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Bling Nation Adds A Paypal Option To Cell Phone Payments
Why Every Site Should Have A Data Portability Policy
Editor’s note : Today the DataPortability Project announces PortabilityPolicy.org – the result of a 16 month effort that it hopes the industry will embrace. This guest post explains what a Portability Policy is, why your site should have a one, and why you should be looking for them. The author, Elias Bizannes , is the chairperson and executive director of the DataPortability Project. Why Did We Do This? The software industry is still figuring out the right balance between open and closed, but we at the DataPortability Project believe that communication is the first step. Tell your visitors what they can expect from you and what you expect from them in return. Your Portability Policy explains the ways that your customers can use the digital “stuff” they’ve entered into your product, including pictures, settings, messages, sounds, lists, or anything else your product manipulates. Can they bring things in? Can they get them out? Can other products use things in-place, or do they need to make copies? Can your product work with stuff that’s hosted someplace else? What is a Portability Policy? Your Portability Policy is a plain-language document that tells your visitors what they can easily bring in and take out. Steve Greenberg , chair of the working group that developed the idea, describes it like this: “In the same way that your Privacy Policy tells visitors what you can do with information they provide, your product’s Portability Policy tells visitors what they can do with it. It should be clear enough that an average user can understand, and short enough that people can actually read it.” The new site, PortabilityPolicy.org , contains a series of questions that will help guide you in creating a Portability Policy as well as several samples. “We need a Creative Commons for EULAs” Greenberg and his team started with the idea that the existing ToS (terms of service) and EULA (end user licensing agreement) model was broken, and something new was needed. The model we use for agreements between people and products comes from a time when the average person didn’t need to deal with very many of them. Developing software was complex and expensive so there weren’t that many choices. The cost of networking to move the our digital data around was enormous. The practical outcome was that you didn’t need agreements with many companies, and your data wasn’t moving around very much anyway. Until four or five years ago this was good enough, but it no longer matches how we use our computers today. Cheap broadband and a new generation of software development tools changed everything. Today you, the user, have a host of choices for pretty much anything you want to do.There’s no more reason why you need one product to provide everything you do online, like you need one grocery store to provide everything you eat. The long-term goal of the Portability Policy group is to create a range of standard portability terms and license clauses that improve communication between people and service providers. What we are announcing today is a set of questions that sites can answer to explain how people can bring data in and take it out. Our intention is to expand this set of questions through ongoing industry conversation—along with machine-readable text and simplified iconography—so people can determine at a glance whether the product meets their needs, and product owners can be confident that customers really understand and agree to the terms. The DataPortability Project wants to open and simplify communication so people make informed choices, enabling market forces to help products meet demand more effectively. In the same way the capital markets have a taxonomy and standard form of communciation when companies disclose their financial results, the DataPortability Project advocates a new specificity in the service agreement language. One that enables full understanding of how personal data can be used in the digital age by companies and their websites. An applied example: Twitter There are three important things to note about the questions that make up the Portability Policy: there is no right or wrong answer to the questions nor are they binding; a company doesn’t have to answer all of the questions; and a company can respond to each question as much as it wants, as long as it provides the minimum answers required. So what would it look like if Twitter had a Portability Policy? If they were to be lazy, a bare-bones Portability Policy might look like this: …and that’s it. All the above answers can be selected from the page with the questions at http://portabilitypolicy.org/questions.html If Twitter wanted to say more—for whatever reason—they could write more. For example, they might want to expand on what API’s they provide, or discuss the reasons behind their decision to not allow you to reuse your identify from other sites. This is where the design of the Portability Policy shows its value—it’s easy to implement and hurts no company by answering the bare minimum; and at their discretion, they can expand to provide context on their decisions or add additional transparency, in a comparable way to other similar services. Why Data Portability matters to companies and users People should have control over their personal information because it will unlock value in their online experiences. But it’s not a zero-sum equation. Site owners have an economic interest to support the portability of people’s data. For example, imagine you are a social network and your revenue model relies on targeted advertising. What value is there in locking in a user’s data, if the data is wrong? Possession may be nine-tenths of the law, but being a walled garden is not a competitive advantage; sites need ongoing access to—not storage of—a person’s data, as it changes. (I’ve written about this before .) In fact, a lot more economic value could be created if sites realized the opportunity of an Internet whose sites do not put borders around people’s data. (You can read more about this in my theory about the information value chain .) Our belief is that Data Portability is a more complex problem culturally than technically. The Portability Policy attempts to help change that culture through better communication. So how does the Portability Policy help with the goal of giving users more control over their data? We believe sites and their users have a relationship, and the relationship is stronger if the user can trust the website to protect their domain over their data. The more freedom the user has to move data, the more likely the user is to share it. And as users become more knowledgeable about how sites might control their data without their knowledge, the websites that are transparent about data use will stand in the best stead with the public. What’s next Among the future work the workgroup will be looking at: Evolving the questions. What else should we be asking companies to disclose? Developing icons. How can we communicate the messages more simply? Machine readable. How can we create more value in the interpretation of the questions by computers? We are launching the questions today, and we’ve explored uses cases with the machine readable questions like a status bar when you visit a site. Our icons are also being developed, with an example of the direction below. This is the beginning of the dialogue between portability advocates, companies and users. As websites adopt the Portability Policy, we will evolve the standard questions. For example, our new credit card potability working group is raising awareness on an important issue—but it’s a business-to-business issue and not one relevant to sites that don’t take credit cards. We will incorporate questions that cater to that workgroup’s suggestions in addition to other issues the community brings up. (The Credit Card group previously was an independent effort, and they decided to come under our umbrella to support our broader goals.) Recommended practices in answering questions will emerge, enabling us to assess websites on an equal basis, comparing them on the key issues that matter for data portability. We believe this is something all companies can easily support with minimal cost, as they gain greater visibility into user expectations and find common ground for communicating with their users. To help websites adopt a Portability Policy, we are releasing a basic generator that help companies pre-fill a Portability Policy. We’ve also worked with a select few companies as we announce this today to show the diversity of applications. For example, Topguest.com launched the other week and filled out their Policy with minimal effort. Beyond the web, we can point to the .tel domain registry that has implemented a portability policy , and in entertainment we can point to Tubefilter . This is the start of a conversation and we look forward to hearing how people can help us grow this initiative. For services interested, feel free to contact me or write a message on our community mailing list . CrunchBase Information DataPortability Information provided by CrunchBase
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Why Every Site Should Have A Data Portability Policy
Trends in credit card fraud, beware of scamsters
There are a lot of opportunities for you being tricked and it is up to you to be aware and be cautious while dealing with your credit cards. Credit Card Fraud Scams,credit card,Application Fraud,Site cloning,credit cards,Credit card …
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Trends in credit card fraud, beware of scamsters
Zynga Goes To The Mattresses With Mafia Wars Users
This story fascinates me on so many levels. Here are the basic facts: Zynga has been moving its games off of the Tagged social network and encouraging users to migrate to Facebook. Earlier this month Zynga gave out a special code to Mafia Wars users on Tagged that would give them $120 worth of currency on Facebook when they completed the migration. But Zynga didn’t cap the number of people that could use the code, and the form for entering it didn’t give users much of idea what it was for anyway. So word spread, and tens of thousands of users entered the code and grabbed the loot. Somewhere around 100,000 people used the code. When Zynga realized what was happening they shut down the code. But then they went one step further and rolled back the accounts for every user who entered it at least 24 hours, removing the free currency but also deleting any actions the users took to move their accounts forward during that period. Users complained on the Zynga forum but those complaints were deleted. Zynga also posted the notice below on their forum and then later deleted that too. When Zynga continued to ignore users they started emailing us instead. Emails thousands of words long came in containing the kind of bitter passion that you usually only see when we say something mildly critical about the iPhone. Some users are saying that they are going to do a credit card charge back on money they’ve previously spent on Zynga games. Others say they’re leaving to try one of the many competitors. Etc. What really seemed to make the users angry is the tone Zynga used in communicating with them: Your account was determined to have attempted to use an unauthorized redemption code that would result in $120 worth of Reward Points. As a result of this action, your account has been reverted to its status as of 5am PST on Tuesday June 8th. and Attention: Our records indicate you have redeemed Rewards Points using an exploit. Please note that future use of exploits may result in disciplinary actions, up to and including the permanent banning of your account. We will keep your account active at this point, but have rolled back your account to 06/08/2010, the date prior to the redemption of these unauthorized Reward Points. If you have any questions, please email taggedcodeexploit@zynga.com. We will respond to your inquiry in 72 hours. Thank you, The Mafia Wars Team Remember that this is just fake money to buy fake stuff on Mafia Wars that costs Zynga nothing to create. The code was created by Zynga and distributed without any technical restrictions on its use (meaning anyone could use it). In other words, Zynga screwed up. But it didn’t really cost them anything since it’s all virtual goods. It seems like the smart thing to do would be to simply turn the code off and move on with their lives. But instead the Zynga team really seemed to think that they had been wronged by their users, and took proactive steps to punish and frustrate them. Instead of seeing passionate users engaging with the game, Zynga saw people trying to take advantage of them and responded by going on the attack. Terrible move. These are your customers, not your enemies. Another observation: Zynga users are more passionate about this stuff than I thought, and while I don’t understand that it does help me understand that the science and psychology behind these games is very real. They are addictive money extraction machines. Here’s Zynga’s official statement on this: “Last week we uncovered a technical issue with a Mafia Wars redemption code during the migration process of two of our networks. In order to protect the integrity of the game and level the playing field for the rest of the community, we rolled back those involved users to a previous save. Less than half a percent of Mafia Wars players were affected.” CrunchBase Information Zynga Information provided by CrunchBase
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Zynga Goes To The Mattresses With Mafia Wars Users
Dorsey Delivers 50,000 Squares, Eyes Global Domination [Video]
Jack Dorsey’s Square is trying to graduate from cool party trick to global game changer. So far, the mobile payments service is far from the mark but it’s making progress. Since its launch, Square has delivered roughly 50,000 devices, according to Dorsey. The founder of Twitter has been a diligent ambassador, traveling to several parties and conferences this year (like last week’s TechCrunch Disrupt) to demo Square and answer questions on security, usability and how the tiny device will make money. Dorsey may seem like the patient salesman but he has serious ambitions for Square that include global domination. In its current form, Square caters to a limited market. For the uninitiated, Square turns your mobile device into a credit card scanner, using a reader that fits into your audio jack and Square software. The device and the software are free, but Square takes a small percentage of each transaction (2.75% plus 15 cents for swiped transactions). As of today, the program only works on the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Nexus One and Droid, but it will reach other mobile devices soon. Although anyone can use Square, its largest demographic is expected to be small US merchants, who need to find a low cost solution for credit card transactions. That slice of America represents a huge opportunity, according to Dorsey, he estimates there are roughly 30 million US merchants who make less than $100,000 per year, of this group only 6 million are currently processing credit cards— the remainder, or 24 million, are all potential Square customers. Despite all the potential, the future of Square is uncertain, given the fiercely competitive world of mobile payments. Beyond the bevy of mobile payment providers who indirectly compete with Square, its closest rivals VeriFone and Mophie have showcased their own card readers in the past year. That doesn’t seem to faze Dorsey who is trying to position Square as a global mobile payments provider that will offer a wide variety of solutions, beyond its iconic Square reader: “The next obvious move for us is Canada. But it really has to be tailored to the culture. Different cultures use different technologies for payments. Japan for instance is using all NFC, Near Field Communication Technologies, all over Africa you’re seeing a lot of SMS usage for mobile banking and mobile payments. Our desire for Square is to be completely payment device agnostic and network agnostic and really work with whatever the culture is using predominantly. Here in the US its plastic cards, as we start going to other markets, like Europe, and to India and to Asia, we’ll be taking on more and more different technologies.” If Dorsey has his way, Square could be huge, or rather, the Twitter of mobile payments. As he explains above, he wants to create a new set of technologies that will allow Square to design tailored solutions for several foreign markets. A credit card reader is only a fraction of the picture. In our video interview, Dorsey did not give a time line for his grand ambitions, but in the near term, he’s focused on accelerating Square’s US adoption. He says it’s vital for the business to reach a critical mass in payers within the next six months. Can Dorsey’s Square conquer America and then take on Canada, Europe, Asia? It’s a tall order, but I wouldn’t bet against the man behind Twitter. See our full video interview with Dorsey above. CrunchBase Information Square Jack Dorsey Information provided by CrunchBase
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Dorsey Delivers 50,000 Squares, Eyes Global Domination [Video]
