The price of freedom, as they say, is eternal vigilance. A user called bitbully on the Bitcointalk Forums found himself 34 bitcoins poorer when he visited a site claiming to be a chat service connected with Mt. Gox, a popular bitcoin trading service. The site, wwwdotmtg(this is an o)x-ch(this is an a)tdotinfo (do not visit this site), apparently places a cross-site transfer order on the victim’s computer immediately upon visiting using a Java applet. Because the transactions aren’t reversible and the attackers are anonymous, the victims are out of luck.

This victim lost half of his account instantaneously. Mt.Gox does offer two-factor authentication, which is a good way to prevent illicit logins. This user did not have it activated. A Reddit thread also addresses this particular scam.

The phishing site, for what it’s worth, is currently down.

The phishing message making the rounds is something like “Mtgox are talking about adding ltc or ppc in about 4-5 hours. Guys, come on the mtgox livechat I think we should all invest in LTC. hxxp://bit.ly/xxx.” The Bit.ly link goes to the phishing site.

The writer described his sleuthing:

Bitcoin phishing is not new and as more and more users enter the BTC fray it’s clear that it will be a bigger problem. As Twitter novelty account Bitcoin.txt notes, the market is frothy and full of folks who have little experience investing in anything, let alone an imaginary digital currency that could be part of a future economic engine – or could spell ruin for investors who click bit.ly links.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

For many app developers, TestFlight was a ray of sunshine that offered desperately needed beta testing tools in the early days of the App Store. I remember many developer friends literally asking TestFlight co-founders Ben Satterfield and Trystan Kosmynka to take their money. They haven’t done so yet, but as of today they’re offering even more to developers, thanks to the launch of FlightPath, an analytics platform made for mobile.

FlightPath is a new entrant in the wold of mobile-first analytics, which includes recent offerings from Mixpanel, Flurry, Keen and others. But the approach taken by TestFlight, and Burstly, the parent company that acquired them in March last year, aims to be different through simplicity and a focus on easy customization.

“What we’ve tried to do is develop FlightPath knowing app developers and their lack of time to make the app better and learn what features customers want, or to explore the data meaningfully,” Satterfield explained in an interview. “For us, the most important thing was to try to get all the information on one page. All the different pieces of data, or at least the most important ones, are all there in a single view.”

Walking me through the FlightPath dashboard, Satterfield and company show clearly that it’s not only about keeping things on one page, but making sure that the data is flexible and can be instantly manipulated to drill down to specific elements. Clicking on any number or graph point in the dashboard automatically updates information, giving you data relevant to that specific piece of your app’s tracked activity. So, for instance, you can look exclusively at users who have signed up after a specific date, see a path analysis of what actions they’ve triggered within your app, and even get a closer look at how frequently something like making an in-app purchase is linked to deeper engagement or further transactions.

Specific views can be saved for later recovery, too, making it so you don’t have to tweak and adjust to get at drilled down information that you find particularly interesting. And FlightPath will also come with some preset configurations built in, so that you can easily see segments like your most-engaged users, those who are at risk of abandoning your app altogether, crashes broken down by device model and more.

Maybe the best part of FlightPath though is that it’s incredibly easy for existing TestFlight users to get running. The beta product launches today, and TestFlight and Burstly will be choosing participants for that pool from existing TestFlight users, who already have everything they need to get started if they have the TestFlight SDK installed in their app. The team says they can start pulling data with a flip of the switch to populate FlightPath from the existing TestFlight SDK.

That said, FlightPath and TestFlight will be offered as separate products, the company explained, since they don’t want to handcuff anyone who wants to use one to the other. Nonetheless, they work together in a very complimentary manner, and TestFlight’s existing devoted following provides a good starting pool of potential FlightPath users. One of the biggest challenges though was living up to TestFlight’s standards, and making sure that it could suit the needs of the incredibly broad range of TestFlight’s existing hundreds of thousands of users.

And for now, it’s still free, though the company still says paid plans will be coming soon to cater to high volume users and offer services that enterprise and large shops would be interested in having. The first release is intended to be a starting point for gathering feedback from the pool of test developers, so it isn’t clear yet when FlightPath will release to the general public, but even at this stage it looks like something that will appeal to a lot of mobile developers.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham just published a blog post suggesting a new way to handle handshake deals, i.e. verbal commitments for investments and other transactions.

That kind of commitment can be a necessary prelude to a more formal agreement. Graham writes: “Things can happen fast in the startup world … so both investors and founders need a way to reserve space in a transaction.” However, he notes that these deals also fall through:

Handshake deals are not unique to Silicon Valley of course. They tend to arise wherever trust is sufficiently high and speed is sufficiently important. Diamond dealers apparently use them a lot.

Unfortunately, things don’t work as smoothly in Silicon Valley as among diamond dealers. This is not a closed community of pros who deal with one another day after day. Many participants in the funding market are noobs, and some are dishonest.

To try to avoid confusion, or at least to clarify who is at fault when a deal falls through, Graham is proposing “the handshake deal protocol.” It starts with a concrete offer, with an amount to be invested, a valuation or valuation cap, and an optional discount, followed by these steps:

1. The investor says “I’m in for .”
2. The startup says “Ok, you’re in for .”
3. The startup sends the investor an email or text message saying “This is to confirm you’re in for .”
4. The investor replies “yes.”

Didn’t follow the steps? Then you don’t have a handshake deal. Graham said that the Y Combinator team is starting to implement this, and that he’s hoping it spreads throughout the Valley.

To me, it seems very Silicon Valley to try to standardize an informal process. It sounds like some investors benefit from that ambiguity, so individual entrepreneurs might not have the power to resist. YC, on the other hand, could make a difference. By creating a clear process and a (digital) paper trail, the incubator can now track whether investors are breaking their verbal agreements, and if they are, those investors might find that they’re no longer as welcome at Demo Day.

And some investors may just be glad that the protocol doesn’t involve any real handshakes.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Over Christmas, employees at ModCloth, the indie and vintage fashion site founded by a husband and wife team, noticed that about 30 percent of the site’s visits were coming mobile devices. The staggering shift in consumer habits from desktop devices to smartphones and tablets that caught companies like Facebook off-guard was starting to affect smaller online retailers too.

So ModCloth is coming out with an iPad app today.

Now the thing is: they don’t think about the iPad or the phone as just another channel for buying clothes that exists in isolation.

They think about how all three devices — the PC, the tablet and the smartphone — work together in concert to help customers decide what to buy and when to buy it.

So for example, they send out push notifications on new items or ones that are just about to run out of stock. Modcloth customers won’t necessarily buy right away, but they’ll save the items from these push notifications for browsing later. The iPhone is for quickly collecting potentially interesting items to check out later.

In contrast, the iPad turns out to be a great device for leisurely browsing.

“With retina images, the iPad is just a fantastic and superior way to shop, so we wanted to focus on it first and foremost,” said Sarah Rose, the company’s vice president of product. In it, Modcloth users can zoom in on fabrics and clothing details.

“On the phone, our customer doesn’t have much time. She’ll look at the feed of arrivals and put favorites on the wishlist,” Rose said. “On the iPad, she’ll look at the reviews and take a closer look at styling.”

The iPad apps has some basic sharing features and processes transactions through Braintree and Paypal.

Rose didn’t have a breakdown of how many transactions actually came in from the iPad. Before, they just had a mobile-optimized website. Other larger e-commerce companies like Groupon have said that 30 percent of their transactions in North America come from mobile devices. 

Modcloth has raised about $50 million in venture funding from firms including Norwest Venture Partners, Accel Partners, First Round Capital and Harrison Metal Capital. The company has posted 50 percent year-over-year growth, although they didn’t provide any figures to give sizing on how many transactions or customers they’re seeing per year. They now have about 350 employees.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Another day, another BIG DATA play. UK-based ERN, a Big Data startup targeting banks and merchants who want to create customer loyalty-based offers, has announced that it’s raised a $2 million funding round. Interestingly, it’s keeping schtum on exactly who is backing the company, except to describe the list of 20 or so investors as “high net worth individuals with backgrounds in the banking, payments and technology sectors”.

ERN says the new capital is to be used to continue development of its “scalable, reliable and secure big data platform” which enables banks and merchants to analyse customer behaviour on a “micro and macro scale”.

The benefit of all this Big Data drilling is that banks and merchants can boost customer loyalty by creating new products and offers based on the analysis of their transactions. For banks, that could mean analysing customers’ transactional history to provide them with individually-tailored offers in partnership with merchants. Meanwhile, for merchants themselves, they can use ERN’s offering to get a handle on individual customers’ purchasing behaviour to create loyalty-based offers, and these can even be targeted based on location and time.

There’s a consumer-facing side to ERN, too. Through a smartphone app, consumers will be able to track spending on their credit and debit cards in “real-time”. The pull being that they can budget more effectively — the trojan horse needed to push those enticing loyalty-based offers.

ERN’s platform is fully PCI and ISO 27001 compliant and is said to be capable of processing 100,000 transactions per-second. The company is also talking up its secure Tier 4 Global data centres with “Bank Grade Security” in the UK, US and Singapore.

In terms of traction, it’s still very early days for ERN. The startup says it’s currently working towards proof of concept trials with a number of high street banks, acquirers and major retailers in the UK, with a launch due in early 2013.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Back in 1996, people in the US bought about 2.3 albums per year. Today thanks to services like Spotify and Rdio, some of us listen to that many albums a day. Last-minute concert ticket app WillCall wants to make live music just as accessible. This week it released version 1.5 of its iOS app that focuses on delivering push notifications and feed about what shows your friends are going to.

What WillCall does is pick the best concerts in town, strike deals with the promoters, and sells tickets through its app the last few days before the show. You can open the app to check out the upcoming gigs available, or sit back and watch for push notifications about newly added concerts or alerts about which ones friends are buying tickets for. The mobile-only commerce experience is super-lightweight, you often get a discount, and you can trust it to only send you to see bands and DJs that are actually great on stage. You can see how it works in the video below.

Here’s why this model has big potential.

With recorded music, the barrier to wider consumption was price. It cost $16 for an album you had probably only heard one song from. It sucked when you popped it into the CD player and the rest were crap. That meant you only plopped down cash when you were almost positive you’d like it.

With live music, price is a barrier, but possibly even bigger hurdles are discovery and scheduling. Face it. A night of drinks at a bar could easily cost as much as a concert ticket. Let me tell you, take a few sips of whiskey in the parking lot before you go to a great show and you’ll have a lot better time at the same price as wasting away in some dive.

But WillCall’s real value-add is solving the other two problems. Founder Donnie Dinch tells me “The average person goes to 1.5 shows every year but we’re obliterating that number.” Low attendance is partly because people don’t know who’s in town. Even with apps like Songkick, monitoring for nearby gigs from your favorite artists and buying tickets before they sell out is a pain. WillCall takes care of all this. It’s editorial team only picks reputable bands, and you only tells you about ones where tickets are still available (or the app clearly displays if they’ve just sold out).

Now that we have so many real-time communication tools like SMS, Facebook, and Twitter, there’s less need to plan things far in advance. In fact, it can be worrisome to buy concert tickets for 4 months from now with little idea if your best buddy’s birthday party will be somewhere else that night, or if you’ll be out of town. WillCall sells the tickets the week of the show, right up until it starts, so you’re sure you can actually attend and won’t have to end up messing around to sell them on Craigslist.

Push notifications from friends assure you won’t be alone at the venue. Dinch says “purchase notifications are what drive the most purchases without a doubt.”

The new WillCall 1.5 updates make both these things even easier. You can get a feel for the musicians its selling tickets for through video previews that show an artist’s best YouTube clip. The new Friend Activity feed meanwhile aggregates all the RSVPs of your chums so you know who to have meet you in the parking lot to get at that whiskey. You an also share your purchases to Twitter in addition to Facebook now to recruit more people to your whiskey drinking session night at the club.

When done right, mobilel commerce is awesome. No shopping, and the transactions go down in the background. What you want gets brought right to you, and the purchase only takes a single tap. That’s why I hear investors saying the early winners of mobile commerce could become institutionalized brands for years to come, and why SV Angel and 500 Startups backed its seed round.

WillCall has apps for iOS and Android, but is only in San Francisco now. It plans to launch in New York and Los Angeles early next year. For now, Bay Area folk can try it out as WillCall is running its own pop-up show with drum machine wizard AraabMUZIK tonight in SF.

[This is a pretty accurate representation of WillCall. The main omission is just that it doesn't have shows for sale every night.]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Flint, a small business-focused mobile payment app that does away with dongles and NFC and instead uses the camera on a phone to “scan” a card’s numbers, has come out of beta. The iOS 6/ iPhone 5-compatible app is now available to download in the U.S. App Store.

In development for the last 18 months, Flint first launched as an invite-only service in May 2012, at the same time that it announced $3 million in funding from True Ventures and Storm Ventures.

Like Square, PayPal’s here, Sail from Verifone and others, Flint is targeting merchants that, traditionally, have been considered too small to accept card payments, because they do not have a high enough volume of transactions to justify the processing fees and card-reading equipment. Flint says that there are some 17 million businesses in the U.S. alone that fit this profile.

Unlike Sqaure, here and Sail, Flint doesn’t rely on any hardware to do the job, other than what is on the mobile phone itself. That means that future-looking solutions like NFC — the basis for payment solutions from the likes of Isis — are also not necessarily for Flint to work today. After a card’s vital numbers are scanned and digitized — the numbers are sent to Flint without being stored on the device — the payment is then authenticated with a zip code and on-screen signature.

In its beta phase, Flint says that it’s already been picking up some decent momentum. It’s had merchants from all 50 states sign up to use the service, including photographers, therapists, consultants, fitness trainers, IT professionals and tradespeople. Flint is not yet releasing total merchant numbers or transaction volumes on the app.

“Flint’s mission is to empower everyday small business users who are out and about and who are underserved by other solutions,” said Greg Goldfarb, co-founder and CEO of Flint Mobile, said in a statement. “We’ve worked very closely with our beta users to develop a compelling app and are excited to make it available to a broader audience.”

Apart from not requiring a dongle to work, Flint is hoping compete against more established mobile payment startups by offering some other advantages. For starters, its commission structure charges 1.95% plus $0.20. Credit card users pay 2.95% plus $0.20. By comparison, Square charges 2.75 percent per swipe. (Manually-entered cards cost 3.5 percent plus $0.15 with Square.) Merchants can activate the service through the app itself, rather than needing to register online.

It’s also offering some services around the transactions themselves. These include social marketing — customers can share business reviews and recommendations on Facebook after making a payment; those can also get posted to a business’ Facebook page. Flint also lets businesses customize receipts, create loyalty offers, program a range of pricing options/menus and include sales tax and tipping. And finally, Flint also offers a kind of online “dashboard” of sorts, where merchants can get an overview of all transaction activity, although there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of analytics around those transactions yet.

For now, the app is iOS-only, but like its competitors, it’s likely that Flint will be rolling out for other platforms soon, and potentially could even work on non-smart devices, given that most feature phones are also equipped with cameras. And given that the solution is software-based, you could also see a time when Flint might also consider how it can create an API to embed its service directly into business’ own apps.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It looks like it will be a very mobile holiday season for eBay this year. The e-commerce company is releasing new numbers today around its mobile growth. Specifically, eBay mobile-only dollars transacted increased more than 200 percent in Q3 2012 over the comparable 2011 period.

As revealed earlier this year, eBay mobile expects to transact $10 billion in volume in
2012, which is more than double the transactions in 2011. As eBay’s VP of Mobile, Steve Yankovich tells us, through the first nine months of 2012, more than 1.8 million new users made their first eBay purchases on mobile. In Q3, more than 800,000 new users made their first eBay purchases on mobile.

eBay is unveiling a number of mobile-only initiatives designed to engage shoppers on their smartphones. For example, the company is debuting an exclusive mobile gift guide and will also feature mobile-only special inventory and deals.

“The mobile business has gotten big enough so we are seeing similar behavior in terms of what people are buying on phones to what people are purchasing on the site,” Yankovich explains. In the future, he says, eBay will continue to focus on letting people buy “anytime, anywhere and anyplace,” via their mobile phones. The company is trying to think creatively about how to surface products on the site, as well as how to get that product into users’ hands.

eBay made a big bet on mobile last holiday shopping season, and it paid off. It should be interesting to see if the growth in mobile accelerates this year and what features consumers respond to.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Google’s early stumbles with Wallet are the startup ecosystem’s gains. Chicago’s up-and-coming Braintree just poached Aunkur Arya, who headed partnerships for Google Wallet, to be its general manager for mobile. The company, backed by Accel Partners, also picked up Klas Bäck to oversee international and payment strategy.

Braintree is processing about $1 billion per year in mobile payments, for clients including Hotel Tonight, Angry Birds-maker Rovio and Zimride, which runs ride-sharing service Lyft. They, along with other competitors like PayPal and YC-backed Stripe, are trying to grab a slice of what is fast becoming the most strategically important area in e-commerce.

Braintree estimates that about 20 percent of e-commerce shopping sessions are happening on mobile devices and that raw figure is growing by two to three times every year. Companies like Groupon say that mobile platforms account for about a third of their transactions in developed markets like North America. Braintree stresses that the $1 billion in transactions it’s facilitating aren’t just peer-to-peer transfers, they’re actual purchases of goods or services directly from mobile phones.

The company, which had been bootstrapped up until last fall, took a big slug of funding from Accel with a $34 million round that the Palo Alto venture firm took whole. They then turned around and acquired New York-based mobile payments startup Venmo for $26 million. Venmo operates as a separate unit.

“Venmo gave us a very slick consumer wallet application that sits right with our our checkout process,” CEO Bill Ready tells us.

Google Wallet, meanwhile, has seen a spate of departures to Square and smaller startups after an internal clash between new leadership brought over from PayPal and early team members who backed NFC. Rob von Behren, one of the founding engineers for Wallet, went to Square, while other founding team members Jonathan Wall and Marc Freed-Finnegan have started their own company Tappmo.

Arya becomes one of the latest to leave the team. Before Wallet, he led mobile app business development at AdMob. That means he should have a wealth of relationships with top tier mobile developers, which will help Braintree quickly rack up more big name clients. Bäck, meanwhile, will lead international strategy at a key time for Braintree. The company just opened in 30 new countries.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Uber has been steadily expanding its on-demand car service from black cars to SUVs, taxis, Hybrids, private drivers and more. Today, the company is announcing the addition of motorcycle taxis (aka moto taxis) in Paris.

Starting Monday, Uber users in Paris will be able to order motorcycle taxis via the app. Similar to the way you can see taxis and black cars on the Uber app in Chicago, you’ll be able to see both the motorcycle and car icons on the map to determine the drivers closest to you.

You simply touch the icon motorcycle taxi to let Uber know that this is the type of ride you are requesting—and similar to Uber’s other transactions, you don’t need to exchange money or sign anything, you are charged via a transaction on your mobile phone.

This is just another way that Uber is offering its users a choice in the method of transportation, and expanding upon its inventory of drivers. While we don’t use motorcyle taxis in the U.S., the method of transport is more common in Paris (and is faster). Uber, which launched in Paris in December 2011, says that it is working with a select group of motorcycle taxi drivers in Paris on the test. For now, Uber Moto Taxis are available from 6 am to 9 pm, Monday to Friday.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch