SumUp, one of the myriad European Square-style mobile card reader startups, has expanded its coverage footprint by rolling into an eleventh European market: Russia. SumUp is now operational in the U.K., Germany, Ireland, Austria, the Netherlands, Spain, Italy, France, Portugal, Belgium and now Russia, giving it a larger international geographical footprint than other European mobile point-of-sales rivals including iZettle and Rocket Internet-backed Payleven.

To support its Russia launch SumUp has opened a local office in Moscow, and partnered with Svyaznoy Group, a Russian retail and financial conglomerate, which will distribute SumUp’s card readers through its nationwide consumer electronics retail network of close to 3,000 stores.

Svyaznoy stores will also be using SumUp’s solution to accept card payments from its customers — giving SumUp another leg up in the market. The retailer, which specialises in the sale of phones, digital equipment and portable electronics, sells close to a third (30%) of all the smartphones in Russia, according to SumUp.

SumUp said Russian businesses can now sign up to its service in Svyaznoy stores as well as on its own website, and are able to receive native language assistance from its Moscow-based support team. Daniel Klein, SumUp CEO, said it’s targeting the more than 6 million small businesses in Russia, and also aiming to grow off rising smartphone usage.

“We see a real need for an easy and secure solution for card payment acceptance in the Russian market. We are excited to work with the strongest possible partner in Russia right from the start,” he said in a statement.

SumUp has been using a partnering strategy to build out its European payments business, including partnering with a women’s plumbers organisation, Stopcocks Women Plumbers, in the U.K.; a maker of iPad POS software in Europe; and with a taxi hailing app and an odd job software platform provider in Germany.

As with the myriad mobile payments players targeting small businesses, SumUp does not charge a monthly fee to businesses using its system but rather takes a 2.75% per card reader transaction charge. It accepts Visa, Mastercard and recently added support for Amex in the majority of its markets.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Fon, the crowdsourced wi-fi hotspot provider that uses technology allowing people to securely share their home broadband connections, has announced a partnership with German telco Deutsche Telekom to build what it’s calling the country’s largest wi-fi hotspot network. The joint network will launch in the summer, under the not exactly catchy name ‘WLAN TO GO’.

DT has 12 million broadband subscribers and more than 12,000 existing Wi-Fi hotspots across German. Commenting on the partnership in a statement, Rene Obermann, outgoing CEO of DT, said: ”By 2016, we want to provide nationwide WLAN TO GO at more than 2.5 million additional hotspots.”

Fon has more than 7 million hotspots in more than 100 countries. The company, which was founded back in 2006, has raised more than €45 million to date. CEO and founder, Martin Varsavsky, told TechCrunch Fon has been cash-flow positive for three years. Fon’s network sees 3.5 million unique users per day, according to a spokeswoman.

Despite rumours, reported earlier this year in the WSJ, that DT might be considering taking a stake in Fon, Varsavsky said Fon is not looking to raise any more money at present. ”We’re well funded,” he said.

Fon’s biggest market for usage is Japan, according to Varsavsky, while its largest hotspot footprint is in the U.K., where it partners with telco BT — also an investor — to offer a network of more than four million wi-fi hotspots. Other investors in Fon include Index Ventures, Google, Sequoia Capital, Skype, 3, Coral Capital Management, Allen & Company, Google and Atomico, according to CrunchBase.

Fon’s technology enables broadband users to share their connection by splitting it into two Wi-Fi signals — one that is private and encrypted for their own use, and the other a public but password protected Wi-Fi signal for use by Fon members. Fon then sells access to its wi-fi hotspot network to carriers, who bundle it with mobile device tariffs, and to ISPs who can also offer a Fon service. Bundling free wi-fi hotspots with tariffs is one way for carriers and ISPs to differentiate their offerings.

In Deutsche Telekom’s case, the telco’s broadband subscribers will need to sign up to the Fon service and share the unused capacity of their Internet connection with other users in order to gain free access to Fon’s global hotspot network.

Varsavsky said Fon’s next focus for network expansion will be additional markets in Europe (DT has subsidiaries in various European countries, including Croatia, Greece and Slovakia — which could be one way for Fon to continue expanding its European footprint). In January, Varsavsky announced the company had entered a deal with Dutch telco KPN, which has some 2.5 million broadband subscribers, to build out a network in the Netherlands – due to go live in the second half of this year.

Although Fon has hotspots in more than 100 countries globally, the vast majority (90 per cent) are located in the following seven countries: UK, Portugal, France, Belgium, Russia, Brazil and Japan, according to COO Alexander Puregger, speaking to TechCrunch last month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Remember “mobile TV”, whatever that was? No we don’t either, but that’s not about to deter new startup Vinson which is launching their their new mobile OTT (Over The Top) TV app on iOS for broadcasters, content aggregators and content distributors at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Essentially this is watching live TV on a tablet, with the full TV guide, plus PVR/time-shifting, plus “social” features for shared watching experiences. They’ve basically crammed a vision of the future TV into an app, and it looks pretty good.

Focused on a “swiping” experience, the app is free to use by broadcasters without any license fees, plus they can request a free branded version of the Vinson app.

One of the first customers to use the platform is a joint venture of Belgium broadcasters that developed a mobile TV solution for the Belgium market, branded as the name “Stievie”.

CEO Vinson Michael Plein says “Mobile clients just didn’t work well and they were just not affordable for many broadcasters and distributors. We have built this solution from the ground up.” One of the co-founders is Raimo van der Klein, one of the former founders of the the Layar augmented reality startup.

The showcase app for iPhone and iPad launches this week in Barcelona. Check it out below.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook Manager of Public Policy Cory C. Owens today announced that he would be leaving the company to work for car services startup Uber. Owens worked out of Facebook’s D.C. office. The company put up a job listing for his position two weeks ago but it has not been filled.

Facebook did remove 27 other job listings from its careers page this week, suggesting that the company made hires for its legal, sales, marketing, data center, measurement and other teams.

Prior listings removed from Facebook’s careers page:

• Commercial Counsel – Inbound (Menlo Park)
• Manager, Global Marketing Business Operations (Menlo Park)
• Language Specialist, Korean (Menlo Park)
• Investigator (Menlo Park)
• Security Program Manager (Menlo Park)
• Business Recruiter (Menlo Park)
• Recruiting Programs Coordinator – Fixed Term Employment (Singapore)
• Content Strategist (Menlo Park)
• Data Center Technician (Prineville)
• Regional Product Marketing Partner (New York)
• Analyst, Global Sales Reporting (Contract) (Hyderabad)
• Principal Writer, User Operations (Menlo Park)
• Account Manager (Toronto)
• Media Solutions, Dutch (Dublin)
• Media Solutions, French (Dublin)
• Media Solutions, Italian (Dublin)
• Account Manager, Norwegian (Dublin)
• Client Partner, Belgium (Brussels – Dublin – Paris)
• Client Partner, Retail/QSR (Toronto)
• Client Partner, Technology/Telecommunications (Toronto)
• Client Partner, Travel (Austin)
• Client Partner, Travel (Menlo Park)
• Analyst, Vertical Measurement – CPG (Menlo Park)
• Quantitative Analyst, Monetization (Menlo Park)
• Analytics Engineer (Menlo Park)
• Data Analyst, User Operations (Menlo Park)
• Software Engineer, Network [Jan 1] (Menlo Park)

Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

SumUp, another Square-style mobile payment dongle that launched in Europe in August backed by more than $20 million from b-to-v Partners, Shortcut Ventures, Tengelmann Ventures and Klaus Hommels, is continuing its rapid rollout by expanding into three more markets to take its total business footprint in Europe to 10 markets.

The three new markets it’s adding are Belgium, France and Portugal. The other seven markets it operates in are its original launch markets of Austria, Ireland, Germany and the UK, plus Holland, Italy and Spain — which it added last month.

SumUp is competing with a plethora of other mobile dongle systems in Europe, including iZettle and Rocket Internet’s Payleven, but the company claims its 10 market-strong European footprint is “more than any other mobile point-of-sale technology provider”. iZettle is currently in seven European markets (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Spain and the U.K.), while Payleven is operational in six markets — including one outside Europe (Brazil, plus the U.K., Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Italy).

SumUp also notes its system is capable of processing MasterCard and Visa payments (via a manual workaround) in all the countries in which it operates. iZettle has had problems processing Visa payments in the past, having acceptance suspended for a time, although it can now also accept Visa via a workaround in which users manually enter their card details.

SumUp’s system works with both iOS and Android. Like its rivals, it charges a per transaction fee of 2.75%. While SumUp only launched services this August, it was founded in 2011 and now has more than 130 employees, with “major offices” in Berlin, London, Dublin, Madrid, Milan and Amsterdam.

Earlier this month SumUp signed a partnership with a German taxi hailing app, Taxi.de, in a bid to grow its userbase. Exactly how many users it has at this point is unclear: the startup isn’t breaking out user numbers yet.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Checkthis received a major update today, making it more than ever a visual complement to the text-only updates on social networks. The service enables users to create compelling posters and share them with their friends. But users now get realtime reactions, a web profile with all of their posters, and notifications. With the new features, it is even closer to a hybrid between Instagram and Tumblr.

“These days, everybody publishes content through social networks, because maintaining a blog is a big commitment,” co-founder Frédéric della Faille said during a phone interview. “Checkthis allows you to publish content that you can’t publish on social networks, without having to set up a separate blog,” he continued.

Since Ingrid Lunden profiled the startup, users created more than 70,000 posters. On average, each poster was viewed 260 times. With today’s update, Checkthis is becoming even more of a social sharing tool for your text, visual and audio content.

Checkthis offers a way to share content that would fit on a Tumblr blog, but with a focus on design. Users select colors and fonts, can upload pictures or embed content from other services, such as Soundcloud, Twitter, Google Maps, and yes, Instagram. Then, with one click, you share your poster on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or Pinterest.

Each poster is like an Instagram picture, with a dedicated URL and realtime comments and likes next to it. Tweets talking about the poster are integrated into the commenting section, as well. Users receive notifications and now have a profile, much like Instagram web profiles.

Compared to Tumblr, Checkthis removes a lot of friction. Content creators don’t have to select a blog theme and can customize all their posts in very different ways. If you want to share a long message on Twitter or Facebook every now and then, it may be the perfect service. You won’t want to resurface an abandoned Tumblr blog just to add a post.

The team of seven is based in Belgium and New York, and has raised $910,000 so far. When I asked della Faille to describe the service in one sentence, he said that “the web is boring, Checkthis is a social network for creative people that want to express themselves.”

Click to view slideshow.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Flatshare finder, SmoovUp, has expanded beyond its native France to launch the service in 6 new countries: UK, Spain, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxemburg, and Australia — and says that the U.S. and Canada should follow soon.

Self-funded, and two years in operation, SmoovUp differentiates itself from other room-for-rent or flatshare marketplaces by putting an emphasis on matching people to each other rather than simply matching people to accommodations.

One way to think of the service is more like an online dating site. Upon sign-up, users take a quiz – the “SmoovTest” – that lists all of the points of agreement which SmoovUp has determined are required for a successful flatshare. This then forms the basis for each user’s profile, which is supposed to reflect their own “lifestyle and values”. Then, just like a dating site, SmoovUp calculates a matching score in relation to other members to help find the perfect match.

In addition, SmoovUp is targeting landlords and real-estate agencies who can post ads on the site for free so that flatmates — after successfully being matched — can easily find a place to rent.

In fact, almost all of the functionality of SmoovUp is free for both flatmate seekers and landlords, with the company offering premium memberships for users who want greater visibility for their ad. Premium memberships range from £7 for a 7 day highlight to £18 for a month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

“Delivering parcels in the trunk of a car is new concept,” said Cardrops co-founder Nick De Mey in what may be one of the finest examples of understatement in recent history. His startup sounds simple: you order something and it’s left in the boot of your car. However, when you consider the ramifications – that your car can tell people where it is, that you’re going to be getting shoes or a blender hidden in your car at some point, and that this is actually a serious start-up – and you start to wonder if Nick De May isn’t crazy… like a fox.

“We focus on convenience for the e-customer,” said De May. “The number one reason to shop online is the time savings. The moment you have to drive around to postal office, lockers, or pick-up point you have lost this time. By delivering parcels directly in the trunk people will not have to think about deliveries anymore.”

The service is primarily Europe-only at this point with field tests happening in Belgium and Germany. “In this pilot we’re focusing on on goods from certain brands that will be delivered to their own employees, in their own parking lots. In this context we have fewer trust, privacy, and security issues so we can focus on development the technology.”

The project is fairly ingenious. Using a dongle that attaches to your car’s diagnostic port, the Cardrops can locate your vehicle and drive over to it. With a press of a button they can pop open your truck, move the running shoes, tennis racket, torn dress, and chloroform-stained rags out of the way, and drop your package in the boot. Then you get notified that your goods are in place. In less e-commerce-friendly countries this could mean the difference between schlepping into a main (downtown) distribution hub and picking up your goodies and having said hub walk down the street to your Fiat Punto and dumping them in your truck.

De May founded the company with his partner Philippe De Ridder. They’ve worked with Volkswagen and Ebay and saw a way to mix the two with Cardrops. They also run and “innovation agency” called Board of Innovation.

While many of us would say “Why they heck don’t you just drop the package at the person’s apartment, you fool,” De May has an answer:

“By tracking the behavior of people and their car we can predict upfront what moment will fit best to deliver and we don’t need to rely on the e-customer to be available to complete the process. You have less re-deliveries.”

The more you think about this, the more it makes sense. If you live, say, in the suburbs of a major city and commute into town you may find it far superior to get your stuff dropped in your car than at the front gate of your unguarded home. This also allows deliveries to be made during business hours and ensures that you won’t have to sit around your cottage waiting for the DHL man to rumble down the street.

Sadly, I doubt this has legs in the U.S., but if De May and De Ridder can convince de Belgians and Germans to sign in, de future for Cardrops certainly could look bright.

Click to view slideshow.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you’re looking to get your hands on an iPad mini after the big reveal this past Tuesday, now’s the time to pre-order, as Apple has launched pre-orders via its mobile app and online retail store, and shoppers can choose any version of the iPad mini or 4th generation iPad for the first batch of orders. If you want to have one in your hands next Friday, November 2, however, you’ll need to get the Wi-Fi only versions, as the Wi-Fi + Cellular editions ships at least a couple of weeks later, as Apple explained at its event this week.

For U.S. shoppers, the iPad mini with LTE ships “Mid November.” In Canada and other markets, expected lead times show estimated shipping at late November. The 4th Gen iPad also shows “Mid November” in the U.S. and simply “November” elsewhere. Apple hasn’t offered up any specific reasons why the Wi-Fi + Cellular iPads will take longer to arrive, but CEO Tim Cook did talk about the challenges of the manufacturing process for the iPad mini on Apple’s earnings call yesterday, so that could have something to do with it.

And of course you have to be living in one of the launch countries to pre-order today. That group includes the U.S., Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the U.K. A few other regions, including Bulgaria, Hungary, Iceland, Liechtentein, Puerto Rico, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, will also have the iPad for sale beginning November 2 at select retailers, but customers in those locales won’t be able to pre-order. That’s a much larger initial launch pool than the 3rd gen iPad’s 12 kick-off markets.

So who’s getting either the iPad mini or the 4th generation iPad this morning (or both/neither), and what’s your reason for doing so?

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s Note: Semil Shah is an EIR with Javelin Venture Partners and has been a contributor to TechCrunch since January 2011. You can follow him on Twitter at @semil.

“In the Studio” continues this week by welcoming a young founder, originally from Europe, who started tinkering with computers a decade ago, taught himself programming languages, began working and consulting while in high school, dropped out of college, bought a one-way ticket to Silicon Valley, and now, at the ripe age of 23, is the co-founder and CEO of a venture-backed startup.

Davy Kestens, CEO of TwitSpark, is just coming up on his one-year anniversary of living in San Francisco. Earlier, while working out of Belgium’s coworking space Beta Group, Kestens began noodling on another small project, just as he had many times before, but noticed on this occasion, people started signing up. Eventually, things snowballed, and Kestens had created an MVP for a customer service product, built on the back of Twitter, for teams of agents at larger brands and companies to handle customer gripes. Before he came to the U.S., Kestens was contacted by Edelman Digital, his first customer was Volkswagon, and he received angel funding from a host of experienced investors, including Founders Fund and Social+Capital.

As 2012 comes to a close, and as TwitSpark celebrates its first birthday, listening to Kestens understated, affable yet no-nonsense style, it’s clear that despite his youthful looks and attitude, he has real business experience, can recruit a diverse team of technical and non-technical colleagues, and is betting his company on a singular yet massive trend — that companies will need to not only monitor their brand engagement on Twitter, but proactively seek out and remedy customer service situations, not just to protect an image, but also to shift away from telephone-based customer service, which can be quite costly, and as we all painfully know, annoying to no end. While other platforms have also emerged to help customers fight back against companies with horrible service — mostly generated by the actions of companies in heavily regulated industries, like airlines, banking, and telecommunications — TwitSpark is signing up companies in each sector above, and if Kestens and his team have their way, your next gripe on Twitter could be routed through his system.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch