Social Commerce

International
Frrole Starts With Crowd-Funding, Ends Up With $245K In Angel Investment
April 22, 2014

Frrole, an India-based data analytics start-up that combs Twitter looking for patterns and trends that could be interesting and actionable for businesses, has just raised $245K in Angel funding from investors including former head of Yahoo! R&D centre in India Sharad Sharma, Eka Software founder Manav Garg and Google’s...

Mobile Commerce
The Five Forces of mPOS
April 17, 2014

Players continue to zig and zag around the mPOS space yet common themes are beginning to emerge. The March mPOS Tracker highlights the five key things that all successful – and scalable mPOS solutions have. Want to see if your solution makes the cut?

Europe
Coming Soon To Payments: Facebook?
April 14, 2014

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...

News
Crowdsourced-Shopping Site The Hunt Nabs $10 Million In Investment From Khosla
April 11, 2014

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...

Alternative Finances
Crowdfunding’s Unique Risks
April 08, 2014

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...

Company Spotlight
The Ten Hottest Trends in Payments
April 01, 2014

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...

News
Retailers And Consumers Part Ways Over In-Store Tracking
March 25, 2014

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...

Alternative Finances
Payments Trends All The Talk At SXSW
March 17, 2014

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,...

Cool
The Long Tail In Event Ticketing
March 17, 2014

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,...