Open Intelligence / Web 3X (Social + Mobile)

Yelp and Groupon are both being sued by a company called Mobile Commerce Framework, an obscure patent troll that earlier filed a similar patent infringement suit against Foursquare.

On April 6, 2010, Mobile Commerce Framework (MCF) was issued US Patent No. 7,693,752 by the USPTO, for reasons unknown to mankind. In summary, this patent describes:

a subscription-based system for providing commerce information for one or more mobile devices for one or more merchants. Some techniques employed feature a subscription-based method for presenting commercial resources to a mobile device. The method involves receiving mobile device user information relating to a geographic location to locate one or more merchants within a subscription-based shopping network, and receiving mobile device user information relating to a merchant type within the subscription-based shopping network.

For those of us who have grown accustomed to purchasing things from our laptops, tablets and smartphones, the experience of walking into a physical store and standing in line can get tiresome. It's hard to top the immediacy and convenience of online and mobile shopping. Yet, there are still plenty of items that are best purchased in person.

Apple hopes to bridge the gap between these digital and physical worlds. The company just released an update to its Apple Store app for iOS. Using the application, customers can not only purchase Apple products like they can on the Apple website, but they can now opt to pick them up in person at one of the company's many retail locations.

The app can also be used as a sort of self check-out scanner for certain accessories in Apple stores. Need a new case for your iPhone or a power adaptor for your MacBook? Now you can scan the item with your phone's camera, pay for it in the app and be on your way.

Exclusive - Tinkercad, a startup that aims to introduce browser-based 3D printing CAD to the masses, has landed $1M in seed funding from True Ventures, Jaiku founder Jyri Engestrom, Delicious founder Joschua Schachter, Eghosa Omogui and Taher Haveliwala.

The company’s mission is to ‘reach and teach’ a wide audience on the use of CAD software and creating ‘fun and meaningful’ things like jewelry, toys, car parts and whatnot, using 3D printers.

Kai Backman, Tinkercad’s co-founder and CEO, explains that one only needs a browser and a couple of minutes to use its browser-based software and have a 3D project ready for printing.

For SMBs, managing banking and payment processes is not as easy — or as secure — as it should be. So, coming out of stealth today is a Boston-based startup called MineralTree that is looking to fix both of these problems. Tomorrow, at the Small Business Banking Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, MineralTree will officially launch its first product: A cloud-based banking and payment solution designed specifically for SMBs.

Backing the startup in its mission to create an easy payment solution for small businesses is a cool $1.5 million in seed funding, raised from .406 Ventures, which has enabled MineralTree to develop its payments solution and make its initial hires, partnerships, and customer acquisitions. The most notable of which is the startup’s partnership with Silicon Valley Bank in Santa Clara, California — the first financial institution to implement MineralTree’s solution and offer it to its SMB customers.

MineralTree’s Accounting Manager app is a web-based add-on to the SMB’s existing accounting system that businesses can use to manage payables, including entering payment information, associate payments with backup documents, along with the ability to prioritize, recommend and submit payments to the CFO or business owner for approval.

Richard Branson is no stranger to investing in mobile media: among his more notable moves have been establishing Virgin Mobile (NYSE: VM) years ago, and more recently moving into iPad publishing with Project magazine. Today comes news of his latest foray into the wireless world: an investment in the mobile payments startup Square.

Square raised $100 million at the end of June in a round led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. At the time, that valued the company at $1 billion.

Square built a business initially on an iPhone-based mobile payments service that is now avaialbe for both iOS and Android devices. It provides a square-shaped dongle to merchants, who can plug the device into a phone to make instant card transactions. Some 800,000 merchants in the U.S. are now using the dongles, and there are around $2 billion in payments processed annually through the platform. At the standard 2.75 percent commission that Square charges merchants, that works out to annuals revenues of $55 million from those transactions going to Square.

It’s been a request by Starbucks aficionados for a long time and the day has arrived! Today, November 8th, 2011, marks the day that Starbucks updated their iPhone app to accept mobile payments in Canada. Version 2.1 is now available to download and brings iOS5 support and the ability to pay via your iPhone. All you have to do to get started is have a registered Starbucks card with money loaded in, upon cashing out the barista will scan the barcode that’s on your iPhone and your balance will be reduced. Good news for BlackBerry and Android users as mobile payments will be coming to you “in the coming months”.

Disruptive mobile payments company Square has just brought on a new investor-Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group. This comes on the heels of the company’s recent $100 million funding round led by led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. The exact amount of Branson’s investment was not disclosed.

According to Square, Branson “took interest in Square’s rapid growth and novel technology, in particular its free hardware that allows anyone to accept credit card payments anywhere, anytime.”

Square has been on a roll of late, processing over $2 billion in payments annually and signing up 800,000 merchants to use its technology. This year, the company also signed retail deals with Apple, Best Buy, RadioShack, Target and most recently, Wal-Mart retail stores. And the company has added Kleiner partner Mark Meeker, Vinod Khosla and Larry Summers to its board.

Zypr is everything you wanted from Siri without the Apple-flavored handcuffs.

This voice-control API gives developers a free platform for writing voice-activated commands for web applications, including navigation, social media, maps, calendars and more.

One of the most interesting and valuable aspects of the Zypr API is that it aggregates third-party APIs from services like Facebook and Amazon, categorizes their functions (for example, social, mapping or shopping) and presents those functions through a single, normalized API, creating a stable access point for devices and apps. If a third-party API changes, the developer using Zypr doesn’t need to make any changes to his or her code. Pioneer says that Zypr can replace around 80 percent of the functionality of the APIs it supports.

A freely accessible index of 5 billion web pages, their page rank, their link graphs and other metadata, hosted on Amazon EC2, was announced today by the Common Crawl Foundation. "It is crucial [in] our information-based society that Web crawl data be open and accessible to anyone who desires to utilize it," writes Foundation director Lisa Green on the organization's blog.

The Foundation explains the scope of the project thusly. "Common Crawl is a Web Scale crawl, and as such, each version of our crawl contains billions of documents from the various sites that we are successfully able to crawl. This dataset can be tens of terabytes in size, making transfer of the crawl to interested third parties costly and impractical. In addition to this, performing data processing operations on a dataset this large requires parallel processing techniques, and a potentially large computer cluster. "Luckily for us, Amazon's EC2/S3 cloud computing infrastructure provides us with both a theoretically unlimited storage capacity coupled with localized access to an elastic compute cloud."

The Foundation is an organization dedicated to leveraging the falling costs of crawling and storage for the benefit of "individuals, academic groups, small start-ups, big companies, governments and nonprofits." It's lead by Gilad Elbaz, the forefather of Google AdSense and the CEO of data platform startup Factual. Joining Elbaz on the Foundation board is internet public domain champion Carl Malamud and semantic web serial entrepreneur Nova Spivack. Director Lisa Green came to the Foundation by way of Creative Commons.

It looks like Facebook has just acquired mobile video and image app developer Digital Staircase, according to a blog post on the startup’s site. We’ve embedded the blog post below and emailed Facebook for confirmation.

Digital Staircase has developed a number of apps for video recording, image editing and more. MovieCam, which is available as an iPad and iOS app, is a camcorder app that provides recording features like 8x digital zoom, pause-and-resume recording functionality, and contrast enhancement. The app also allows you to add 18 movie effects and filters while shooting video.

From the post, it appears that the development team may be adding some of these functionalities to Facebook itself. Unfortunately, Digital Staircase will be removing its apps from the Apple App Store.

Best Buy will send its Geek Squad into the cloud, after purchasing Boston-based mindSHIFT Technologies in a deal valued at $167 million.

MindSHIFT provides online applications and data center services for small to medium-sized businesses, boasting over 5,400 clients across the U.S., and with the purchase, Best Buy plans to extend its reach into the business world, including the legal, healthcare, financial, nonprofit, and education markets.

With its ubiquitous brick-and-mortar stores — and its Geek Squad driving Volkswagon Bugs from IT issue to IT issue — Best Buy believes it’s well positioned to offer cloud computing services to businesses with neither the time nor the resources to support their own IT infrastructure.

with the holidays coming up and more consumers than ever expected to make purchases from mobile devices. PayPal believes there is a lot of horizontal movement to be made in the mobile payments space and with the power of eBay behind it, the company thinks it will be the leader in the ecosystem for years to come.

PayPal specifically realizes that it has lost a lot of the consumer mindshare in mobile payments with everybody talking about how NFC may or may not change how payments fundamentally work.

For 2011, PayPal expects to do $3.5 billion in mobile payments volume. With mobile payments expected to be a $600 billion industry by 2015, PayPal is positioning itself to take a big portion of that pie.

Do you remember the amazing game of Memory?

The aim of the game is to remember each card you flip over and find all the pairs.

In a similar fashion, Dave Brown, the design blogger at Holiday Matinee created “The Amazing Game of REcollection,” that turns the art of discovery into a fun game that rewards you for playing. For online shoppers in need of a brain exercise, the app is great. Not only does playing the app double as online shopping, but for each board completed, you are given 15% discount codes to various online shopping sites like Toddland, Photojojo, WeJetSet, Feelgoodz, and Holstee.

TeliaSonera, a Scandinavian-based telephone company, has conducted a trial for an optical network that saw a terabit-speed optical transmission based on 500 Gbps super channels.

A super channel is a large unit of optical capacity created by combining multiple optical carriers into a single managed entity — like an optical cloud of sorts.

This is the largest super channel created so far, and it is based on Infinera’s 500 Gbps photonic integrated circuits (PICs).

Google Maps is a big part of Milk’s first mobile app, Oink. And Rose wants to build in more Google technology in future updates.

Oink lets people rate and discover things in the places around them. It is a first step at creating a directory and recommendation system for things in the physical world.

Clipboard aims to become the go-to service for saving and sharing the relevant parts of any page or service available on the Web, including much of its core functionality, or put differently taking care of everything in between simply bookmarking a URL and having to save an entire Web page.

Using a bookmarklet, Clipboard users can ‘clip’ things like search query results, stock quotes, tweets or Facebook status updates, video clips, images with captions, a Google Maps map, a forum answer, an Amazon book review, an eBay product summary, a digital coupon, and the likes.

Select part of a Web page or service, and use your mouse (simply by hovering over something or, preferably, by using the scroll wheel) to increase or decrease the number of ‘zones’ you would like to clip. Your selection – including links and images etc. – will be saved to your Clipboard profile instantly, and you can jump straight to it to visit your clip collection

Whether Newsstand was Apple’s strategy all along, I don’t know, but I think it might have been. The app is the unit of distribution for newspapers and magazines, not the “issue” or the “article”. This puts more work on the publishers’ shoulders — they need to design, create, and maintain software, not merely publish content — but it gives them more control over the reader experience and more potential for creativity and differentiation.

Why not the same thing for TV channels? We’re seeing the beginnings of this, with iPhone and iPad apps like HBO Go, Watch ESPN, and the aforementioned Bloomberg TV+. Letting each TV network do their own app allows them the flexibility that writing software provides. News networks can combine their written and video news into an integrated layout. Networks with contractual obligations to cable operators, like HBO and ESPN, can write code that requires users to log in to verify their status as an eligible subscriber.

Why not the same thing for TV sized displays? Imagine watching a baseball game on a TV where ESPN is a smart app, not a dumb channel. When you’re watching a game, you could tell the TV to show you the career statistics for the current batter. You could ask the HBO app which other movies this actress has been in. Point is: it’d be better for both viewers and the networks1 if a TV “channel” were an interactive app rather than a mere single stream of video.

Cloud computing startup enStratus has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding to grow its business of managing all types of clouds across a common interface. El Dorado Ventures led the round with participation from Vesbridge Partners.

The long and short of enStratus’ technology is that it provides a secure platform for managing and monitoring popular public and private cloud offerings through a single interface. In theory, this means customers can utilize multiple clouds and even switch between cloud providers without having to learn the intricacies of each provider’s APIs or management consoles.

The Minneapolis-based EnStratus is similar to the more widely known RightScale service, although enStratus actually supports more clouds. It currently claims support for Amazon Web Services, AT&T Synaptic Storage, Bluelock, Cloud Central, Cloud.com, CloudSigma, EMC Atmos (e emc), Eucalyptus, Google Storage, GoGrid, Nimbula, OpenStack, Rackspace, Terremark, VMware vSphere, VMware vCloud Express and Windows Azure.

Twitter has just announced a key engineering hire today. Adam Messinger will be joining the company as Vice President of Infrastructure Engineering.

Messinger was previously Vice President Development at Oracle, where he was responsible for managing the Oracle Coherence, Oracle JRockit, Oracle WebLogic Operations Control, and other web tier products. Prior to joining Oracle, he worked as a venture capitalist at Smartforest Ventures and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

At Oracle he was responsible, for the development Exalogic, Java SE, FX, ME, and Card, Coherence, Virtual Assembly Builder, Middleware Lifecycle and Applications Lifecycle. Prior to his time as a VC, he founded Gauntlet Systems Corp., which was acquired Borland.

Des Moines is the home of mobile payments platform Dwolla. It is an interesting case study - local startup creating buzz within the community and getting retailers and consumers to actually use the platform. Dwolla has created a mobile payments ecosystem from the bottom up.

Within a 5-mile radius of Des Moines there are 500 to 700 business that are using mobile payments through Dwolla. The company works kind of like a payments version of Foursquare. You check at the register in the store using your phone and a pre-loaded Dwolla account.

it is likely that the company will be able to partner with banks and financial institutions in the near future to go straight from a bank account to the retailer.