Square’s not just for businesses apparently, as an invite-only page for a product called “Square Cash” has popped up. Not many details are known about it, but we’ve reached out to the company for comment.

UPDATE: A Square representative sent us the following statement on Square Cash: “We’re excited to share Square Cash with our friends. We’ll continue to invite others to try it out in the coming weeks.”

The splashy animated page shows an email to a friend with a $25 payment, with a Square email address in the CC line:

There’s only the promise of email sending at this point, but you can imagine that this could become a permanent part of Square’s native apps at some point.

This approach is similar to other personal payment solutions, like Venmo and PayPal. Google wants you to send payments to people via Gmail and Wallet. Even Visa got into the act at one point. You can view the page right now, and that’s it. Sending money to friends is a social experience that really hasn’t been cracked yet, and it makes complete sense that a service like Square step up to take the crown. The space is officially hot again.

The page promises that you can send money directly to someone’s debit card, even if they’re not signed up for Square. They’ll be given a link to attach a debit card with their first received payment, which serves as a fantastic way to onboard new Square users:

The invites are being controlled by the company, not even allowing you to enter your email address. There’s also a help page set up for the “Cash” product already, sharing that it will cost the sender $0.50 per transaction and will be free for recipients. You’ll both get receipts for each transaction. The company says on the page: “Square Cash is the easiest way to send money to anyone, using just email and your debit card.”

The company just announced a new, pretty iPad cash register for businesses, but Square clearly wants to be in all of our pockets…and bank accounts.

While it’s hard to decrypt CEO Jack Dorsey’s tweets and Vines, Square Cash might have been the reason for this recent little celebration:

Celebrating an excellent little something. vine.co/v/b9JqebYq1wj

—
Jack Dorsey (@jack) May 20, 2013

We’ll let you know when we get our invites.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

We’ve all by now heard about how Yahoo is trying to get some “cool” with a supposed $1 billion purchase of hip blogging platform Tumblr, but it may be a moot point if Tumblr’s users fail to stick around post-sale.

Microsoft and Facebook may be trying to make a move ahead of Yahoo, Tumblr may be inching ever closer to running out of cash, and (despite that) may not be afraid to play a little hardball. But here’s something you’re not hearing much about: Tumblr’s users are almost universally unhappy with the news that the site might get sold to Yahoo. And they may let their fingers do the talking, and the walking.

Do a search on Tumblr for “yahoo” and you get a stream of distress, interspersed with the occasional bit of helpless resignation, and some calls for activism. The voices of reluctant acceptance (usually because of the aforementioned cash situation) or anything like positivity are few and far between. No outright enthusiasm.

(Daddy!) See for yourself.

It’s a problem that extends to some of Tumblr’s oldest users.

“If Tumblr goes to Yahoo, I will seriously consider moving my personal blog to Medium, if that’s possible,” Alexia, co-editor over here at TC, told me. She’s had a blog on Tumblr since June 2009, and, while not part of that coveted 18-24 age bracket, is a significant representative of that other cadre of important users: digital influencers. “I don’t know exactly why, but my Tumblr is a part of my identity. And for whatever reason, I don’t want to identify with Yahoo.”

Some have tried to start a petition, with a goal of 5 million signatures although others are cynical about whether this will actually have any effect.

User attrition is not something to be dismissed, especially when it appears to be underpinned by wider usage trends on the site.

When I wrote a post in January about what might come next for Tumblr as a business (it focused on how it could make money; not how it might need to get sold because it doesn’t), I noted that in the prior month, December 2012, it had 167 million visitors and nearly 18 billion pageviews worldwide (Quantcast figures). The trend over the last six months are down, however: in the U.S. page views are down 21% to 5.3 billion, and uniques down 5% to 76 million. Worldwide the picture is better but still not growing: pageviews are down by 4%; uniques are down by 3%.

Not a sinking ship, but not a zippy little speedboat, either. Yahoo’s MySpace, indeed.

Image via Tumblr

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Using Google Maps today is great for what it’s supposed to do, get you from point A to point B. But there’s a lot of information that Google collects that you never get a chance to glance it, or don’t have a reason to. Google wants to give you more reasons to explore a map, and it’s obvious with the preview of its latest version. This truly is a re-imagination from the ground up, and exactly what the recent leaks tipped off.

I sat down with Jonah Jones, Lead Designer, Google Maps and Bernhard Seefeld, Director of Product Management, Google Maps to discuss the thoughts behind the revamp, one that’s being rolled out in preview mode today — seemingly because it’s such a drastic departure from what’s available now. The main element of navigation is now the map itself, rather than the search box and left-hand information that we’re used to. Once again, it’s taking cues from the mobile versions of Maps, running smooth and fluidly and providing the information that you need within the context of the map itself, rather than take your focus away with search results along the side.

Jones explained me: “What if you could create a billion maps, one for each user. That’s what we’re doing here.” What this means is that Google Maps will now adapt to the things that interest you, including restaurants you’ve been to, ones that you might like and what your friends have done. The brilliant imagery that Google Maps has at its disposal is being pushed to the forefront, running along the bottom of the page. Until now, you had to click buttons to look at some of these images, now it’s all integrated. Google Earth is even making its desktop debut, thanks to WebGL.

Here’s a look at your main navigation screen for Maps on the web:

In case you’ve forgotten, this is how Google Maps looks today:

The extra white space and sidebar navigation in all of Google’s products are getting completely wiped out, thankfully.

A new map, over and over

As you click around the map, drilling into specific areas, the screen is redrawn to adapt to your personal interests and tastes. This approach makes all of Google’s previous offerings seem static. When you click on a point of interest, like a restaurant, you’re doing so from the map itself, and a Google Now style card pops up on the left-hand side with user and Zagat ratings, reviews from your friends and quick entry points to photos of the venue from Street View, both inside and outside of the venue:

Jones noted subtle changes on the map as you interact with it over time: “The map has gone from being this anonymous blank slate to one that I’ve started coloring in myself, because it has become my map. When you go and rate places, it makes them friendlier, they become more prominent with the new design. Places now show up as personal landmarks. Some icons have a yellow glow, and these are places being recommended, for example.”

Here’s what he’s talking about:

There are now over 100M “Places” on Google Maps, with more being added every second.

“The map gets more useful, the more you use it.”

New direction(s)

The way that directions are laid out on the map has been changed, as well. No longer do you have to click on one driving route over another to see the differences, they’re now all laid out on the map at once for you:

Here’s a neat trick, too: If you want to go from point A to point B and don’t have the exact addresses, you can simply click on the map to plot it out on the fly. This is something that I’ve wanted to do on any decent mapping product for quite a while, since dense cities like San Francisco are easy enough to navigate if you know the general direction in which you want to go.

Speaking of dense cities, public transportation has gotten a new treatment with this redesign, as well. Not only does everything look better, but you’re actually given more information to make decisions in the future. For example, if you’re looking up a Caltrain route, you’ll be able to dig in deeper to see the times throughout the week so that you have an idea of how to plan out your day. The quick information that comes up in the Card is just as handy:

Finally, flights have been integrated into Google Maps. This has probably been one of the requests that I’ve heard the most for the product. It makes complete sense that if you’re sitting on a map and are able to put in two locations, like airports, that you should get flight information back…especially since Google already provides this data within its Search product. Well, it’s here now:

It’s absurd to try and figure out why this hasn’t been available to us until now, especially since Google has been leaving money on the table with the sponsored links and results for buying flights.

Visuals

The nice, but not necessarily most-used part of Google Maps is its imagery. You can essentially “visit” a place that you’ve never been before with Street View photos, outdoors and indoors. Digging into those photos hasn’t been easy, so you’ll always have the ability to click through to them within the new Maps experience.

Jones and Seefeld walked me through Google Earth’s integration, which now requires no plugin or software download. Still, the features seem to be more than the regular person would use, unless they have a lot of time. It’s clear that Google wants people to see its Maps product as a place to discover new places, plan an adventure and then explore.

The new visual effects to zoom in and out of locations is seamless, and pretty neat. One moment you can be looking at a flat map, the next, a 3D rendering with satellite imagery:

Keep pulling back and then you’re in the solar system. Want details? The renderings of Earth come complete with real-time clouds:

My favorite part has to be the photo tours, which stitches the photos taken by Google, as well as users, and morphs them all together into a “walk-through” tour. This works really well for big tourist destinations, like this example in Rome:

Too much?

If you want to try the new Google Maps experience, you’re going to have to sign up and wait in line here: http://maps.google.com/preview. I’m told that some of the functionality from this will find its way into the iOS and Android versions of the app, but for the most part, this is very similar to what you’ll find on those apps. Not much is missing.

The effects are stunning, with shadow effects, new design elements and social cues to check things out. Will it encourage people to use Google Maps longer, or will they just come to get directions, send them to their phone or print them out and then be on their way? That remains to be seen, but Google has definitely thrown the kitchen sink into the product. Everything that the Maps team has been working on over the past ten years is here.

Luckily, it’s all formatted in a way that doesn’t stop you from performing simple tasks. The imagery sits at the bottom of the screen, but is more readily available than it was today. The team tells me that they’ll be collecting feedback, which should make the eventual transition to the new design a little easier for everyone to take.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

As one is wont to do, I was checking the French iOS app store rankings this a.m. just to make sure that my old mainstay app “ameli, l’Assurance Maladie” was still in spot No. 3 when sacrebleu! — Path was the No. 1 free app in France.

Now I’ve never really clicked with Path, rarely checked in with people there (it’s super awkward to name drop digitally) and have too much FOMO to stomach scrolling through all the things you people are doing on weekends without me. Though I found the redesign to be a vast improvement, I didn’t actually use the app at all until people began to say things like, “Did you see all the crazy stuff he/she posted on Path?”

So I log in every once in a while to use it, morbidly curious, thinking that only people in my rarefied circle use it to brag or complain about their personal lives off of Twitter. Because of laziness, I still use Twitter to complain and brag.

There are plenty of things I don’t use that are popular (WhatsApp?), but I’m particularly fascinated by Path’s erratic growth. Seriously, how does one go from No. 740 in overall French apps on May 8th to No. 1 on May 11th? Dave Morin confirms that the startup isn’t using cost-per-install networks like AppGratis or any other sort of paid promotions other than Facebook ads, which he maintains are not particularly effective. And although the app was accused of being overly spammy and recently blocked from Facebook’s social graph API, it (with the exception of the calls) isn’t more egregious in its outreach than something like Facebook.

In fact, I just onboarded myself again to Path to test whether it was handsy with the invite process and have come to the conclusion that if you’re any sort of smart person, it doesn’t “spam” your friends. As in, don’t check “Invite Friends” if you don’t want to do that and it won’t invite them. Do you need me to repeat that?

Anyways, God only knows what Path is doing to get users in France if it’s not paying for promotion (we’re working on a whole ‘nother story about this). It might be some sort of David Hasselhoff/Germany-effect where the product market fit across cultures is weird but works. I’ve been asking the French I know why they think this is happening, and, though many of them have no idea, French blogger Gregory Pouy came up with some theories.

In his own (Note: French-as-a-first-language) words:

There is one thing that it is VERY important to understand about France: you’ve got Paris on one side and the rest and the other side. For sure we have other big cities but interestingly enough, Paris is one of the major city for Twitter but is France is rank 17 (I think). I believe Path is big in Paris (not in France) and some other cities which is slightly different.

Then, I believe that France is a mature market (especially Paris) when talking about social media, which mean:

- A need to go private especially that in France we have really true strong relationship.

- Directly connected to the way Facebook evolved (this is not private anymore) and people are a bit fed up/ afraid and just use Facebook for what it became (a mix between professional and personal).

- Twitter is too complicated for many.

Smartphone penetration:

- In France, mobile operator are supporting the smartphone so you don’t have to pay for it – I think the penetration rate is comparable to the U.S. (50%)

PR:

- A lot of bloggers talked about Path (me for example) as a solution for having a private relationships for true real friends

For example I wrote several article but one in a major french Newspaper called Le Figaro on that specific subject pushing Path.

Also there is a strong trend amongst teenagers since a month as they don’t want to share private stuff in a place where their parents are.

As others have pointed out, Path has a hard row to hoe over the past three years, having to engender trust as a “private” social network while quickly demonstrating venture-validating growth. Le chemin de la réussite a de nombreux nids de poule.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Larry Yu, the public relations executive who has headed up Facebook’s corporate communications operation for five years and helped steer the company through the publicity blitz surrounding its IPO, is leaving the social networking company. He announced his departure this morning in a post on Facebook, writing:

“Nearly five years ago, I joined some friends at a privately-held company called Facebook to help a small team scale and expand upon the company’s story. That journey was, in a word, crazy. And fun. Terrifying. And gratifying. So I’m off to do it again. I’m joining my friends Brandee, Brian and Sean to help build The Pramana Collective, a project-focused communications consultancy that works with cool companies.”

Yu is not the only tech PR big wig on the roster at the Pramana Collective, which first emerged earlier this spring. The Brandee he refers to above is of course Brandee Barker, who headed up Facebook PR from 2006 to 2010; Brian is Brian O’Shaughnessy, who previously led communications at Skype after four years at Google; and Sean is Sean Garrett, who previously headed up PR at Twitter.

Sean Garrett wrote in a post on his personal blog that Yu will be joining Pramana as a partner next month, and added a few details on the specialties he’ll be bringing to the firm:

“Brian, Brandee and I have all worked with Larry in the past, and we know that his close-to-20 years of experience is a perfect fit for The Pramana Collective and our clients. Beyond being a thoughtful guy who is universally liked and respected, Larry knows how to navigate companies through chaotic growth stages with confidence and calm. And we all admire how he makes financials, process and operations look easy, maybe even fun (well, almost).”

It’s a loss for Facebook, to be sure, but a big gain for the startup world. We’ll certainly be watching to see how Pramana shapes the conversation as it takes on clients.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Q: Why does a to do list application need $3.5 million in funding? A: Because it’s becoming more than a simple to do app. Today, Any.DO one of the more popular to do list applications for web and mobile, announced a seed round of funding led by existing investor Genesis Partners, with participation from both current and new investors Innovation Endeavors (Eric Schmidt’s fund), Joe Lonsdale, Blumberg Capital, Joe Greenstein and others.

The company had previously announced $1 million in angel funding in late 2011 from Innovation Endeavors, Blumberg Capital, Genesis Partners, Palantir (Joe Lonsdale), Felicis Ventures (Aydin Senkut) and Brian Koo.

For those unfamiliar, Any.DO got its start on the Android platform after the success of the team’s first app, Taskos, which proved the market was ripe for such a concept. That app had grown to 1.3 million users by the time Any.DO arrived in November 2011, and today has more than doubled its install base.

Any.DO, however, has since surpassed it. The company says its flagship application now has more than 5 million users across iOS, Android and web. Referencing data from Onavo Insights, Any.DO claims to be the market leader in the to do list app space. (Its nearest competitor, Wunderlist, announced earlier this month having more than 4 million users.)

Unlike many apps, Any.DO has more Android users than iOS, having initially taken advantage of that platform’s popularity, its need for well-built apps, and the potential built-in install base coming from Taskos, who were encouraged to switch over to Any.DO when it first debuted.

Any.DO is beautifully designed, which has the side effect of making the app appear deceptively simple. But in reality, there’s some heavy lifting going on under the hood.

“We believe the tools you have on your homescreen are going to be smarter and smarter over time,” explains Any.DO founder and CEO Omer Perchik. “In terms of the to do list…it will help you accomplish the things you have on your list, and we’ve developed a semantic engine that extracts intents and tries to find the relevant action,” he says. “And on the other hand, it’s basically predicting what you’ll be interested in doing.”

So for example, if you tell the app today that you want to plan a trip or workout at the gym more often, it will recommend other applications that will help you complete those tasks, including things like Kayak, TripAdvisor, MyFitnessPal, and many others. Also, if you tell the app you need to do something like “pay taxes,” it’s smart enough to start reminding you about that task in advance of tax day, even though you never provided an exact date or time.

In some cases, Any.DO has affiliate relationships with the dozens of apps it points users to, but in other cases it does not. Perchik says that conversion rates are high – more than three times above the market average of 1 to 5 percent, in general.

Asked whether or not the company had the intention of using the funding to further develop Any.DO or to expand its lineup by launching more apps in the personal productivity space, Perchik says “possibly both.” However, the company isn’t heading into other spaces like email or calendaring just yet, he adds.

That being said, Perchik did cite the recent trend in startups developing alternatives to the core applications on users’ homescreens – things like email (Mailbox, Triage, e.g.), calendaring (Sunrise, Tempo, e.g.), and messaging, etc. “There’s a lot of things in the day-to-day personal productivity space that are relevant [to us], but we’re less working towards building something like Google Docs or Office for mobile – we’re focusing more on the individual,” he says, defining Any.DO’s interests.

The company will have some announcements around what its future plans may be in about a month’s time, Perchik also notes.

In the meantime, the 12-person startup is using the funding to staff its new San Francisco-based office where Perchik now works. The R&D and product team remains in Israel, but the new office will hire those on the marketing and business development side of things.

In addition, an update to the Android version of Any.DO is rolling out now which will allow Astrid app users (one of Yahoo’s many recent acquisitions) to import their data in advance of the app’s shutdown.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

One interesting thing to watch is how social networking platforms mature divergently as businesses around the world.

Sina Weibo, the public microblogging platform that has had a huge impact on online discourse in China, is veering down a path toward e-commerce and transactions after Alibaba took a stake worth $586 million in it last month. The platform is one of the two more influential social networks in China today, with the other being Tencent’s messaging app WeChat.

But unlike WeChat, Sina Weibo’s growth has slowed over the last year and its parent company Sina has had visible issues in monetizing the platform. (It feels a little bit like the heat Twitter had a few years ago for taking longer to bring in revenue-making products like promoted tweets and in-stream ads.)

“Weibo is pretty mature right now,” said Alibaba CTO Wang Jian in an interview. “It’s not in a fast growth period.”

In the Sina’s last earnings report, the company said Weibo made just under $50 million in revenue, or about 12 percent of overall advertising revenue. But investments in the company contributed to an $8.5 million operating loss for Sina last year.

Now with Alibaba’s investment, it looks like Weibo will take a different money-making path than its Western counterparts, which are more dependent on sponsored stories or in-stream ads.

“I think the best way to monetize Weibo is through e-commerce, not by ads,” Jian said. “That’s what I believe. That’s my personal thought. Weibo has a very good chance to integrate with the Alibaba business.”

It’s a win-win deal. Alibaba, which is veering toward an IPO, is China’s dominant e-commerce company and has an extremely data-driven culture. But it hasn’t been as successful with its own homegrown social networking efforts. At the same time, Sina isn’t widely considered to have the same caliber of technical talent as China’s other flagship Internet companies.

While Jian didn’t give a lot of detail on how they would integrate the two platforms, one could imagine that users could get targeted offers on goods and services related to things they’ve posted status updates about.  

“We just need time to find out how to have a synergy of data between the two companies,” Jian said. “Weibo just gave us a new challenge for that.”

As for Aliyun, the smartphone OS that Jian is overseeing, Jian says that he doesn’t think the platform will fit Weibo — which is sort of hard to believe considering that Weibo is a mobile-centric product.

“I don’t think Aliyun really fits the Weibo deal,” he said.  

While Tencent’s WeChat, which has surged to 190 million monthly active users over the past year, isn’t a direct competitor, Jian says it is in terms of other metrics.

“If you’re thinking about time that people spend on their devices, then you can say it’s a direct competitor. If you look at it from just a media perspective, I don’t think it’s direct competition. Two years ago, everyone spent time on Weibo, and now Weixin (WeChat) is becoming that app. It’s really a time spending problem.”

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

For the past several years, my New Year’s resolution has been some version of “cook more often” or “try a new recipe every week.” But it never really lasts. As much as I love the act of actually cooking, so much about it is a huge hassle — choosing a recipe, shopping for all the ingredients (and paying for a whole bottle of a spice I only need a tablespoon of), ending up with a bunch of leftovers.

A New York City-based startup called Plated feels my pain — and has raised a $1.4 million seed round led by ff Venture Capital along with angels including TechStars, Manischewitz Company CEO Alain Bankier, Facebook vet Andrew McCollom, and LA-based “adrenaline-fueled” investor Paige Craig.

Plated, which was founded last year by Harvard Business School alums Nick Taranto and Josh Hix, compiles gourmet recipes from noted chefs such as Michael Mina and delivers all the ingredients necessary to make a home-cooked meal — from the cut meat and chopped produce, right down to details such as a teaspoon of tumeric or a quarter cup of coconut oil — directly to your door. Plated costs $14 to $15 per plate for non-members, and as little as $10 to $12 per plate for members.

At the moment, Plated’s delivery area serves a swath of the United States’ Eastern seaboard from Virginia to New Hampshire, spanning a population of 52 million (since launching in late 2012 Plated has delivered “tens of thousands” of meals, Taranto and Hix said in a recent interview.) The funding means that Plated is working to expand that delivery area to other regions in the US in the coming months. Plated, which is currently working out of Manhattan’s TechStars incubator, is also actively growing its full-time staff, which now stands at 15 employees.

The seed funding also helped Plated develop a new social aspect of its service launching today called “Social Recipe Pages.” The idea here is to be a central place where people can share photos and relate cooking tips.

“With thousands of customers cooking the same meals on same night any given week, this will be a place for them to connect and engage with each other,” Taranto said. “They can talk about what they’re doing, share their personal takes on the recipes, talk to the chef who designed the meal, and ask questions.”

While Plated’s competition on the meal delivery side are services such as Seamless which deliver already prepared food from restaurants to young professionals and older empty nesters (which are Plated’s strongest demographic groups), the Social Recipe Page launch puts it into competition with the AllRecipes of the world. It’s an interesting next step toward Plated’s long-term vision, which goes well beyond ingredient delivery — it’s a larger goal of using technology to help bring us as humans back to our roots when it comes to food. Taranto puts it like this:

“As a working white collar professional, you spend the day at a computer. But there’s a visceral human desire to sink your knife into something. The creative process of making food, and sharing that with people you love most in life, is inherently human. The chopping, the boiling — people want to do that. The bigger picture is that we’re building the online food brand for 21st century.”

As a big idea startup with very unique business model, Plated will certainly be one to watch as it continues to scale.

Watch the video embedded below to see a Plated box and hear Taranto talk more about the company’s history and plans for the future.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google announced today an expansion of its online storage efforts with the release of a “Save to Drive” button that can be added to any website, allowing visitors to click and save files hosted on the site to their personal Google Drive accounts. The button is already being used by Bigstock, Delta Dental, Fotolia, O’Reilly, Outbox and Zen Payroll, Google notes.

To use the new feature as a website owner, it’s only a matter of pasting a couple of lines of code into your site’s HTML. The button is configured with a few attributes in a “div” tag, similar to how Google’s +1 button is created, the company says. There are a number of more advanced configurations, which Google explains in technical detail here, including support for the Save to Drive button’s JavaScript API, which allows for programmatic and more flexible control of the buttons on your web pages.

The button works in the context of the user’s browser, allowing visitors to save files that require some form of HTTP authentication. After clicking the button, the file is first downloaded to the user’s browser, then uploaded to Google Drive.

It’s a small utility, but it addresses a larger issue with using cloud storage: Often, to move files found on the web to your personal online storage site, you first have to save those items to the desktop in an intermediary step. But in Google’s vision, the desktop is fading away, and everything will be built on top of the web’s platform instead.

This is most apparent in Google’s efforts with its Chrome OS and Chromebook devices, including the newer, high-end Chromebook Pixel, a flagship device meant to demonstrate the potential in a web-only machine.

Google has already made it easier for users to forgo saving files to their computers in a number of products, including within Gmail, where optional links have long since allowed you to open standard file types without first downloading them. That feature today supports all the major attachments that people send (e.g. .pdf, .doc, .xls, .ppt, .rtf, .sxw, .sxc, .sxi, .sdw, .sdc, .sdd and .wml). Google Drive, however, supports an even wider range of file types, which will make the button useful for sharing the kinds of files that a website owner may want to share, such as videos, graphics, archives (.zip and .rar), markup and code and more.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Online payments startup WePay is announcing the launch of Veda, an intelligent social risk engine that leverages social media data as well as traditional business data to catch merchant fraudsters.

As we’ve written in the past, Y Combinator-backed startup originally formed to make it easier for groups to collect money and make payments together. But recently WePay pivoted slightly to become ultra-simple platform for businesses to collect and manage payments online. The startup added support for event registration and ticketing, custom invoicing, donations, mobile payments and e-commerce.

Last year, the startup rolled out a white-label payments API and lowered its prices to court third-party developers and debuted an easy way to embed in-line payments.

Founder Bill Clerico explains to me that fraudsters attempt to steal billions of dollars online. Often, fraudsters will set up an account acting as a merchant, and will solicit payments from consumers. So payments companies like WePay have to conduct in-depth security assessments to determine whether a merchant isn’t attempting to commit fraud.

Veda is a more data-focused way to underwrite merchants and make sure they are actually verified sellers. Clerico says, “A traditional credit score only shows a sliver of who you are, but an online profile allows us to assign our users a more accurate ‘WePay credit score’ based on their personal history of verified, social data. Veda’s intelligent brain is the new, smarter way to assess risk.”

Veda uses data from social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Yelp coupled with proprietary algorithms to mine and analyze a merchant’s social signals to gain a more accurate picture of risk. Veda uses pattern recognition, integrated support data, and automatic cross-referencing to analyze risk.

Veda needs five pieces of information (versus the 21 some payment companies require) to get started: first name, last name, name of business, email address, and phone number. Merchants can be approved within minutes.

WePay says that this patent-pending technology is already analyzing over 250,000 transactions per month. And since October 2012, Veda has stopped more than $30 million in attempted fraud.

WePay isn’t the first payments company to start using social data for risk assessment–Max Levchin’s Affirm is also using social data on the consumer end. Signifyd is also using social data for risk assessment in payments.

WePay has raised a total of $20 million since being founded in 2009, including a $10 million round led by Ignition Partners that it announced last year. Other investors include Highland Capital Partners, August Capital, and angels such as Levchin, Ron Conway, Dave McClure, and Steve Chen.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch