iZettle, the mobile payments company that has been described as a European version of Square, is today making a move that puts it one national boundary away from the U.S. mobile payment company’s own backyard: iZettle is launching its iOS and Android service in Mexico. This is the Swedish company’s first move outside of Europe, and comes in the wake of a $6.6 million funding round from the Spanish financial services behemoth Banco Santander, announced just last week and made specifically to build out the solution into more markets globally.

Yes, the mobile payments market — like those chilies being sold by the small merchant pictured here, who probably only accepts cash payments today — is heating up.

To coincide with the launch, iZettle is also appointing a new MD for Mexico, Luis Arceo, who had been with Visa.

Jacob de Geer, the founder and CEO of iZettle, tells me that of the many markets where Banco Santander is active — the bank has operations across Latin America, the U.S., Portugal, Germany and Poland, in addition to the UK and Spain, with $1.86 trillion in managed funds, 102 million customers and 14,392 branches — it chose Mexico first for three reasons.

For starters, he notes that nearly all (99.8%) of the businesses in Mexico are small and medium enterprises, iZettle’s target market because, compared to bigger chains, they may be more likely to lack enough turnover to justify the investment needed for more tradition card payment processing services.

Similar to Square’s dongle and those of Here and many other competitors, iZettle’s smartphone accessory lets merchants and other businesses process credit cards using an app on a smartphone or tablet. iZettle’s particular service works on iOS and Android devices, and the company today is launching a new device that is all-in-one for all platforms and payment methods, be they chip or mag stripe. Interestingly, though, it looks like iZettle will be hiking up fees in the country. In Europe, the company charges a flat 2.75% fee, while in Mexico the fee for chip-based transactions will be 3.75% and for mag-stripe 4.75%. On top of that, merchants need to pay $499 (MXN) — about 40 U.S. dollars — for the reader, but Banco Santander customers will get a discount.

De Geer notes that 95% of cards in Mexico are chip-based. That, in fact, may be one reason why Square, whose dongle reads the magnetic stripe for transactions, may have yet to make a move here. (It’s thought that this is one reason why it has yet to launch in Europe as well.)

There is also the Santander angle: the bank is the third largest in the country and “growing rapidly,” deGeer notes.

And the third is perhaps the most contentious of all from a competitive standpoint: “Mexico is an interesting bridgehead given its geographical location,” deGeer notes. “With our new Chip & Mag reader that we’re launching, we could theoretically continue expanding north or south with the current infrastructure.”

Them’s fightin’ words, I think. iZettle, prior to today’s news, had operations in the UK, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland. More specifically, in the past, de Geer has made a point of saying that it would not be looking to tussle with Square in any of the markets where it currently operates, which include the U.S., Canada and most recently Japan.

When iZettle picked up $31.4 million in June 2012 (it’s now raised $66 million in total), the intention was to be the biggest player of its kind in Europe.

“Our priority is to get the UK fully launched, and then look at other major markets like Spain, Italy, France and Germany,” de Geer told TechCrunch at the time. “We’re not interested in the U.S. They’re doing really well with Square and others.”

That tune has changed quite a lot in the last year. Rather than ruling out the U.S., now de Geer notes, “Time will tell” when and if that move gets made.

Given that iZettle already has services in Spanish because of its operations in Spain, this will make one of the challenges of entering a new market a little less complicated. The backing of Santander will also help with connecting with and marketing to local small businesses. “The biggest challenge for us in any market we want to enter is always to localize the service in terms of language, currency, sign up process as well as finding the right distribution channels,” de Geer notes. “We live in a globalized world but to be successful you still need to act local. For those reasons, we believe our strategic partnership with Santander will be very valuable.”

For Santander, it will be one more way of picking up and locking in customers at a time of disruption across the financial services industry, as behemoths like Visa find themselves disrupted by much smaller startups, with everything else in between. “This partnership extends our offering of payment methods available on Banco Santander’s platform globally, and strengthens our position as the leading bank for SMEs,” noted Jorge Alfaro Lara, deputy general director of payment systems at Banco Santander Mexico, in a statement. “We are pushing the boundaries of banking with relevant technological innovation that helps small and medium businesses.”

Image: Flickr

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Dobro utro, zdravo, and pozdravi, friends! In an effort to spread the good word about TC to the rest of Europe, I will be rolling through Sofia, Belgrade, Zagreb, and Ljubljana at the beginning of July for a series of informal meet-ups. If you’re in those cities, I want you to attend!

Additionally, we want you guys to submit your startups to the TechCrunch Europe Battlefield or, if you’re feeling saucy, to Disrupt SF in September. While I had initially planned to make these meetups scouting trips for the event, it looks like the deadlines for both are fast approaching. Instead, we can chat about your application when I come through your town.

Assisting in the planning is Netokracija / Netocratic, the “TechCrunch of Southeast Europe.” They will provide us with locations and more specific timing but as it stands we expect to have some free beer, lots of sunshine, and a great chance to talk about your startup in an informal setting. We’ll also be scouting for Disrupt entrants for Disrupt Berlin in October.

These will be informal meetups where I’ll talk a little bit about TechCrunch and getting the attention of media outside your own country and we can talk startups, entrepreneurship, and funding all night long.

To RSVP for Sofia on July 1 click here. Co-hosted by  Netokracija / Netocratic & Eleven
To RSVP for Belgrade on July 2 click here. Hosted by Netokracija / Netocratic.
To RSVP for Zagreb on July 3 click here. Hosted by Netokracija / Netocratic.
To RSVP for Ljubljana on July 5 click here. Hosted by Netokracija / Netocratic.

Interested in sponsoring the event? Please contact organizer Ivan Brezak Brkan, head of MemeMedia, directly. We’ll have much more information soon, but until then RSVP and get your product ready for our Southeast Euro Trip!

Special thanks to our main sponsor, the .me domain.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Here’s a neat greentech idea currently seeking crowdfunding on Kickstarter. SunnyBot is a microcomputer-powered robot that continually tracks the position of the sun, angling its on-board mirror so that it keeps reflecting the sun’s rays onto a fixed point of your choice. The basic idea being to harness solar energy for use as an indoor light-source when rooms might otherwise be in shade, or to target the sun’s heat where it’s needed — for warming a room or heating a swimming pool or nurturing indoor plants, and so on.

SunnyBot’s creators — an Italian startup called Solenica — say the bot can also be used to improve solar charging performance by concentrating the sun’s energy. A single SunnyBot redirects 7,000 lumens to the location of your choice (equivalent to a single 500W halogen lamp). Obviously, the SunnyBot needs to be able to see sun in the sky to work — so residents of Iceland in December are going to find it brings them very little light relief. This is a gizmo for nations where sunshine is often plentiful. And where, despite this sunny surfeit, the sun’s natural energy could still be better targeted to improve the human environment.

Inside the sun-tracking mirror-wielding bot, itself powered by a row of solar cells, is a dual-axis, integrated microcomputer with an optical feedback system. The current SunnyBot design is a prototype, so its technical specifications will be tweaked as the startup moves to industrial production, with additional elements intended to be added to the design to improve durability, such as a custom enclosure for the mirror to support and contain it, and also the use of injection moulding for high quality body and mechanical parts.

Solenica is also planning to offer an open source version of the SunnyBot — called SunnyDuino – that, for a small price premium, will come with an additional Arduino-compatible controller and SDK so bot owners can hack in to the device to develop their own functionalities for its targeted beam of light and heat.

Solenica is aiming to raise £200,000 ($312,000) via Kickstarter to step up to industrial manufacturing so it can bring the device market. It also plans to spend some of the money on marketing SunnyBot, as it ramps up to license it to global manufacturers. It says it believes it can ship the first production run of the bot in time for the 2013 holiday season.

SunnyBot will be assembled in Italy, with macro components produced in different locations, including the electronic boards in Cambridge, U.K.; microcontrollers in Arizona, U.S.; and mechanical parts in Modena, Italy. The consumer cost per bot looks likely to be several hundred pounds. There are a limited number of Kickstarter pledges costing £199 ($310) which include one device.

Ayannah, a gift-remittance startup in the Philippines, just received $1 million in its first angel round.

The company’s service is called Sendah, and allows Filipinos working overseas to pay for products and services back home for their families through Sendah’s site.

Sendah has a number of benefits over plain cash remittance. The company has worked out a number of discount deals with vendors on its site, so some of the products are cheaper online than off-the-shelf. Also, being able to pay for services directly allows the migrant workers to ensure the cash is used for the intended purpose.

The company launched in 2010, and has about 50,000 users. It’s targeting an estimated 200 million migrant workers living abroad.

Ayannah has another service called Sendah Direct, which is targeted at the large unbanked portion of the domestic market. It provides prepaid credits for companies it works with, allowing users to buy prepaid airtime or gaming credits, or gift certificates, for example. It also processes bill payments and money transfers between some larger retail chains such as drugstores.

It has about 7,000 retail partners, and has a million repeat customers in the Philippines, it said. One of its enterprise customers is Smart Communications, one of the two main telcos in the country.

Ayannah’s founder and CEO, Mikko Perez, said the company plans to enter South Asia and Latin America, and license its platform to partners in EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) before year-end. Ayannah is already in “advanced talks” with partners in Central America, South Eastern Europe and Central Asia, he said. The company is focusing particularly on the unbanked demographic in these countries, so it’s likely that Sendah Direct’s model will be the platform getting licensed in these countries.

A third service, Sendah Connect, was just launched. Sendah Connect is a mobile app that allows free SIP calls and delivers live and archived video content on mobile phones, said Perez. The product will accept payments through a prepaid online wallet service. The app is available for Android phones now, and the company plans to market it to the US, Japan and Singapore soon, he said.

Ayannah employs a staff of 45, based in the Philippines.

This round of $1 million was led by LA-based Siemer Ventures and Golden Gate Ventures, which has operations in Singapore and in San Francisco. Including this round, Ayannah has received $2.5 million to date.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It was only in March that one of Russia’s hottest startups — hotels booking service Ostrovok.ru – raised $25 million in a Series B round led by billionaire investor Yuri Milner. We said at the time that this market is very capital-intensive, especially in a market like Russia.

But today we learn just how difficult this might be in the mid-term. Today the company has announced on its blog that it is letting go of a third of its staff. Staff will be compensated with three months’ full salary and bonus, and their options will also vest. To Ostrovok’s credit they are making the news public so that their staff can find new positions: “If you need great people, write to Kate (katya@ostrovok.ru)”.

The reason, writes cofounder Serge Faguet in the blog post, is that they want to “take the company to break even” something they said they’d wanted to do last year. However, it’s clearly not happening as fast as they predicted, hence the layoffs.

Unfortunately, the hotel booking space is a crowded one in Russia, and despite there being a rising middle class in Russia, the cost of travel can take out a hefty chunk from people’s expendable income.

And while Ostrovok probably needed cash to scale up, the margins in travel booking are well known to be thin, requiring a lot of scale to make sense. It’s the age-old problem of burning cash to get to that scale – or cutting costs to make the numbers work better.

Faguet, however is understandably trying to be upbeat about this move, noting that brand recognition is up “20%”, and he says they have hit 100,000 bookings and “are growing more than 50%” in the last quarter.

Faguet told us via email: “The story is pretty simple… We’ve taken on too many people and projects simultaneously and, after raising our Series B, decided to pull back and work in a more focused way (and make ourselves more attractive for future fundraising). We still have over 130 people at the company.”

He goes on to say on the blog: “Our strategy remains exactly the same as before, and the quality of customer service will not change.”

So it seems it’s more of a case of a startup cutting lots of side projects and focusing on what it does best.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Last we saw Lumu Labs it was in Hardware Alley at Disrupt New York where the Slovenian startup was showing off a prototype of its digital light meter plus iPhone app — aiming to convince photographers to replace “bulky” traditional light meters with a pocketable gizmo that plugs into their iPhones. Now, the startup has just kicked off a Kickstarter campaign, aiming to raise $20,000 over the next 25 days to get its light meter into the wild.

Lumu’s hope is to replace the standalone light meters that pro photographers carry around with them by harnessing the iPhone’s processing power and battery, and coupling that with its own digital light sensor. The sensor plugs straight into the iPhone’s headphone jack. Lumu says its hardware is more sensitive than the on-board iPhone light sensor, hence it’s able to provide photographer-friendly luminance measurements.

The basic idea is for a photographer to grab a light reading using Lumu on their iPhone, then input the suggested settings into their camera. Settings are displayed in Lumu’s app, which also allows the user to save data to the cloud so they can retain light-setting and location info, plus add voice records, notes, pictures, photo parameters, and more.

Returning to Kickstarter, Lumu said campaign funds will be used to help with the manufacturing costs of the device, and to recruit more coders so it can further extend the features of the app. The startup’s main software guy, Benjamin Polovičm, told TechCrunch: “We want to take advantage of the smartphone’s processing power and different sensors. The plan is to make different smartphone apps with custom functionalities for all sorts of professionals (photographers, videomakers…).

“We also believe that other developers are more creative than us and hope that they make their own software with new ideas and features, or inspire us. Further, we have to make Lumu work on (almost) all Android devices. But we don’t want to be too specific about our future ideas, because we don’t want to limit our supporters’ creativity.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Irish startup Galvanic has just launched a Kickstarter to crowdsource funding a wireless stress biosensor it’s calling PIP. PIP — which stands for ‘personal input pod’ — is a Bluetooth biosensor that monitors its user’s stress levels by measuring their galvanic skin response (GSR) as they hold the PIP pinched between thumb and forefinger. GSR means skin conductance — so basically how sweaty you’re getting and therefore how nervous you’re feeling.

PIP isn’t just a quantifiable self-tapping biosensor; it’s been designed to work in conjunction with iOS and Android phone and tablet apps to provide a gamification element. The company has created three games designed to be played using the PIP, which utilises Bluetooth as its data transport tech. The user’s stress level is then incorporated into each game as the core gameplay mechanic — with the ultimate aim being to help the player learn what they need to do to relax.

It sounds a bit counterintuitive, since competitive gaming can be synonymous with sweaty palms, which is presumably why Galvanic’s project extends to designing stress-busting games. It’s created three games to be used in conjunction with the PIP — a relaxing racing game, a seasonal mood game where  players meditate on a wintery scene to turn it into spring, and a more playful lie-detector multi-player game — but it does also plan to launch an SDK in future to get third party developers expanding the PIP’s gaming ecosystem.

With this initial handful of in-house games the PIP can only be so interesting, but if Galvanic can convince enough people to buy in to the gadget and thus lure enough outside developers to join in, there’s plenty of potential for other cool biosensing software ideas. The price per PIP is $79 for a limited number of early bird Kickstarter backers, or $99 thereafter. Presumably each new PIP-compatible game may also carry a consumer price-tag.

Galvanic is gunning for $100,000 in Kickstarter funding, with the money to be used for finalising manufacturing and readying its own apps. Assuming it hits this rather ambitious funding goal, the company reckons it can gear up for mass production by the end of 2013, and expects to be shipping in Q1 2014. In future it said it plans to expand platform support beyond Android and iOS, to add Windows Phone, Blackberry, Windows, MacOS and also game Consoles and set-top boxes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Internet has plenty of dark corners, but one of the darkest is surely the growing number of sites that traffic in child pornography. Google, which has no interest in surfacing any of these sites and images, has long worked with numerous nonprofit organizations and law enforcement agencies to help protect children online and keep these sites out of its index. The company has, however, recently been criticized by U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron and others for not doing enough to fight child pornography online.

Today, Google pledged $5 million to the fight. It will distribute this money to a number of organizations in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia and Latin America. Among the organizations that will receive these funds are groups like the U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) and the U.K.’s Internet Watch Foundation. Google has also set up a $2 million Child Protection Technology Fund to “encourage the development of ever more effective tools.”

Since 2008, Google has been tagging the child abuse images it detected in its index and those that were reported to organisations like the NCMEC to ensure that it could also identify any copy of these files.

In today’s announcement, Google revealed that it has recently started to add this information to a cross-industry database that it shares with law enforcement agencies and charities. This, Google believes, will allow these organizations to “better collaborate on detecting and removing these images.”

Later this week, representatives from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook and a number of telecom firms will also meet with the U.K. Culture Secretary to discuss this issue.

It’s worth noting that Google is obviously not the only search company that is working to combat child pornography online. Microsoft has a similar initiative, and the company also tags images of child abuse it finds using its PhotoDNA technology. Facebook started licensing PhotoDNA from Microsoft in 2011. The company has also been working with a number of law enforcement agencies to develop the Child Exploitation Tracking System.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Calling all startups from Europe, the Middle East and Africa. We want you. For the very first time, the full TechCrunch Disrupt conference (complete with the main TechCrunch Editors and Writers) is coming to Europe and we’re looking for the very best startups to launch on our Disrupt stage as part of the world-famous Startup Battlefield. The winner gets a shiny Disrupt Cup, $50,000 cash, and a huge amount of attention from the world of tech.

The Startup Battlefield is the heart and soul of our conferences. Companies like Yammer, Dropbox, FitBit, Swype and hundreds more have launched from the Disrupt stage. We’ve always had an international contingent, but come October, it will be Europe’s time to shine.

Last month, at Disrupt NY 2013, Enigma bested a very impressive batch of startups including HAN:DLE, SupplyShift, and Zenefits. The very best startups show up at Disrupt.

Are you ready to launch your company on the biggest startup launch stage and get the highest profile possible? Tell us about it.

For the first two days, 30 companies will present their product to a panel of judges — a group of experts that include partners from major VC firms and CEOs and other execs from major tech companies who take you through your paces. Then comes a shortlist and if you make it to that you pitch again.

But first you have to apply. Click here for the application and full list of rules.

More details about Disrupt Europe:Berlin 2013 will be announced in the coming weeks. ‘Early bird’ tickets are currently on sale at a significant discount. We are preparing a stellar line up of speakers and panels, the cream of Silicon Valley and Europe combined. Disrupt Europe: Berlin will also play host to some awesome parties and receptions. We hope you’ll join us.

But we need your help. Apply for Startup Battlefield and help us make the first Disrupt in Europe one they’ll talk about for years to come.

Applications are reviewed by TechCrunch writers and on a rolling basis — and the last two Disrupts had record numbers of applicants — so it’s to your advantage to submit as soon as you are ready. Due to strong demand, we are unable to review applications more than once, so please do not submit a draft application before you are ready for final consideration. Just submit the one good one.

PowerPoint slides and video demos are optional but highly encouraged. We reserve the right not to review applications without video demos based on application volume. We look forward to reviewing your application.

All submissions are confidential unless otherwise permitted by applicants on the application form.

And of course, our sponsors help make events happen. If you are interested in learning more about sponsorship opportunities, please contact our sponsorship team at sponsors@techcrunch.com.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Ebay is generally credited with being the first company to bring auctions — a system that, for nearly 2,500 years, had exclusively taken place live in noisy, public (and offline) forums — into the Digital Era. But, today, in spite of the fact that eCommerce has become a thriving global industry, with online marketplaces collectively topping $1 trillion in sales last year, one market in particular has managed to resist the disruptive influence of technology and online commerce: The grand old world of fine art.

Not to be deterred, a handful of startups have emerged in recent years behind a shared goal of leveraging eBay’s online auction model to bring some automation and democratization to the staunchly brick-and-mortar industry. The efforts of three young companies in particular, the New York-based Paddle8, Berlin’s Auctionata and India’s Saffronart have begun to find some support, both from insiders and investors.

To wit: Last week, a number of well-known names in the fashion and art worlds put their through their support behind Paddle8, an online auction house founded in the summer of 2011 that aims to connect buyers and sellers of art through both monthly themed auctions and benefit auctions, which allow non-profits and foundations to hold events online.

Damien Hirst, the controversial, English pop artist, Alexander von Furstenberg, the son of prominent fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg, along with members of the Mellon family were among those to contribute to the startup’s latest investment. The $6 million round follows on the heels of a $4 million Series A last year, both of which were led by Founder Collective and Mousse Partners.

Part of the interest in Paddle8 is its mission to become the online destination for beginners and wily veterans alike. It wants to walk the line between stuffy and accessible, allowing the public to access and buy legit, curated works and find insider opinions from the influential figures who participate as guest curators for its auctions.

There’s also the fact that, as Semil Shah wrote when he interviewed co-founder Aditya Julka earlier this year, it’s not easy to build a viable online marketplace in a complex and opaque industry like the one that has grown up around fine art over the decades. Artists, gallery owners and collectors are very particular about the process by which pieces of art move between each party involved in the transaction (understandably, given the amount of money that may be exchanging hands) and what kind of re-sale options are involved.

As Semil points out, a virtual auction house, if done right, can solve problems which have traditionally deterred some art holders from working with offline auction houses. For example, if an owner ends up selling art back to the gallery after buying it at an auction, they’re likely going to take a significant hit in doing so. Not to mention the fact that many auction houses (online and off) typically price out a big chunk of the market, limiting auctions to items over $100K.

Paddle8 aims to deal with these industry-specific issues by catering to the “lower, higher end” of the market, offering auctions on items up to $100K and setting durations at a fairly lengthy two weeks. In saying “lower, higher end,” we mean that it’s not quite the affordable, accessible-to-everyone end of the market startups like Zazzle and Art.com cater to; however, it still opens it up to a larger audience than those upstream, while maintaining an air of “legitimacy” for serious buyers and sellers.

For galleries and gallery owners, the startup offers a set of services which allow them to run their back-ends via its platform, including a dashboard for inventory and transactional management and the ability to ship, install and insure artworks without placing limits on time and geography, as we wrote last year.

The key to building a successful marketplace and business in a niche industry like this (and really any other, for that matter) is that you have to know, and respect, your audience. Even if they’re a little bit eccentric — or snobby. Paddle8 also gives galleries, art fairs and museums a POS transaction platform and, going forward, it wants to offer them private, virtual rooms to display artworks to potential buyers — rather than having to attach a .JPEG to an email, which is the way things usually work — along with the ability to auction works outside of their exhibition. The company also attempts to appeal to art sellers by taking a 6 percent commission from sellers, while charging buyers 12 percent.

The startup also keeps all records and prices involved in auctions private, meaning that it doesn’t disclose details of whether or not a piece of art sold, didn’t sell, or sold for less than the asking price. For artists or owners, this can be a fairly attractive policy in an industry that’s all about your reputation and show — taking a hit or failing to sell might have insiders turning up their nose at you the next time around.

Of course, Paddle8 isn’t the only one that sees opportunity in a digital marketplace for fine art. Founded last year, Auctionata shares a somewhat similar vision in that it wants to peel back some of the frumpy layers of the art world by making the international art market more accessible to the general public. In a slightly different approach than Paddle8, however, the Berlin-based startup is going directly after the big names in the old world of auctions, like Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

It’s doing this by attempting to re-define the familiar, live format by hosting auctions every Friday from its own TV studio. Basically, it’s going for the 100-percent-online, streaming media version of Sotheby’s. Auctionata also offers evaluation, appraisal, authentication and marketing services — along with some of the logistical tools in Paddle8′s arsenal. However, unlike Paddle8, where the average artwork sells for about $10K, Auctionata is going after the high-end. In April, it auctioned off a painting that a had a starting price of $1.5 million, for example.

Having grown to 110 employees over the last 12 months and looking to expand further to go full bore after this market, Auctionata recently raised some of its own outside capital. In April, the startup landed $20 million from Earlybird Venture Capital, Bright Capital and Kite Ventures, among others, bringing its total investment to $23 million.

With its new capital, Auctionata wants to continue hiring and build a bigger, 5,000-foot studio in New York, and expects to hit $20 million in revenue this year, according to Crain’s.

Meanwhile, with Paddle8 busy attacking the fine art market in the U.S. and Auctionata moving across Europe, a company called Saffronart has been busy applying the eBay-for-fine-art model to its home market in India. In fact, the company, which has been around in various incarnations for over a decade and has raised over $12 million from Sequoia and others, now claims to be the “largest fine-art auction house in India, online or otherwise, and one of the largest online fine art auction platforms in the world.”

For most of that time, Saffronart was almost exclusively focused on the Indian market (and Indian art) and while it’s sticking with what’s working, it, too, has been looking to expand its scope and started selling Western art for the first time last year.

Whether or not this world seems too niche to get overly excited about, these startups are finding an eager audience, especially toward the lower-end of the market. The musty air of the fine art market is in sore need of some fresh tools that can make its goods and services more accessible, and whether or not we find it all a little high-falutin’, for these three companies (among others), the approach seems to be (quietly) paying off.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch