In a departure from their roots as the internets premier destination for posting adorable pictures of children and ill-advised pictures of drinking, Facebook is making and entry into the payments industry with remittances and electronic money. The social media behemoth is weeks away from receiving regulatory...
The Hunt offers and interesting variation on crowdsourced shopping–it allows users to post snap shots of retail items like clothing or home goods and then post them and get other users trying to hunt them down. It is an approach that has garnered attention and...
The “kickstarter” movement, where groups of private investors provide funding to get new businesses and projects off the ground, has seen a fair share of innovations – both success stories and an assortment of failures. But the concept of crowdfunding in general also has taken...
Sure, security is on everyone’s mind these days, as no one wants to be the next poster child for data breaches. But other fundamental issues and market changes also are affecting the industry as well, and it’s important not to focus on one issue to...
Omnichannel retail is very popular with business. Customers, by contrast, are far less excited. By allowing retailers to connect to customers’ smartphones while they shop in real-time, brick-and-mortar stores are able to gather the types of customer data that until now was only available to...
The South by Southwest (SXSW) festival now underway in Austin, Texas, is representing an opportunity for various payments players to show their wares and demonstrate emerging technologies’ possibilities. It’s also generating lots of discussion. The recent woes affecting Bitcoin have not dimmed hopes for cryptocurrencies,...
A 3-year-old events concierge app called Sosh reportedly is looking to bring in revenue by adding more utility to its services, which now are offered in San Francisco, New York and Seattle. Known mostly for providing advice on places to go and things to do,...
One of the most difficult things marketers come across is trying to gather consumer payments and buying trend data across multiple merchants. A 2-year-old startup called InfoScout uses consumers to provide just that using the cameras on their smartphones. InfoScout uses “fun and engaging”...
Foursquare has received a $15 million investment from Microsoft. As part of the deal, Microsoft received a multi-year licensing deal for Foursquare’s location data, the company said in a Feb. 4 blog post. The $15 million will be included in the money Foursquare raised in December....
