The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘money’

We’re just trying to create a balanced world for you, dear. Now hand over the money! “The way our engine and game structure works is that people need to have the exact same content for people to play together.

Excerpt from:
2K Games explains why you have to pay for BioShock 2 DLC already in your possession

From now on, any story about “hackers” or “hacking” will be accompanied by a link to the song “ Halcyon And On And On ,” as made famous by the movie Hackers . With that in mind: who made more money last year, Wall Street fat-cats or hackers?

Read more here:
Hackers cost U.S. businesses $25 million in phishing-related scams in 2009

When Plancast launched last November, it immediately put other sites like Upcoming, Dopplr, and every single e-vite service on notice. The “Foursquare for the future” has a simplicity that leads to a lot of social activity as we’ve seen over the past few months. And now that vision will get to flourish further with some seed funding.

The $800,000 seed round (which technically went to Plancast parent Worldly Developments) features an impressive investor list: SoftTechVC, True Ventures, Founders Fund Angel, and Zelkova Ventures. As well as individual angels, Aydin Senkut, Saul Klein, David Cohen, Joshua Schachter, Dave McClure, Dan Martell, Ron Bouganim, and Paige Craig. With the round, SoftTechVC’s Jeff Clavier also accepts a seat on Plancast’s board.

The funding comes at a great time for Plancast as the service has just completed its first iPhone app (due to be submitted to the App Store shortly), and hopes to leverage the upcoming SXSW festival in Austin, Texas to get more users on board. A couple weeks ago, Plancast launched a special SXSW page to make it simple for festival-goers to see all the events going on and note which ones they plan to attend. (There is also an area for those not attending SXSW.)

Plancast remains a two-person team, founders Jay Marcyes and TechCrunch alum Mark Hendrickson. With the money, they plan to do some hiring including developers and designers. Up until now, Plancast has offloading some work to contractors including former Pownce co-founder Leah Culver to build their iPhone app.

Previously, Plancast raised a micro-seed from fbFund last summer. The service has an API in the works that should be entering private beta soon. And after the SXSW madness, the plan is to implement more privacy features, we’re told.

Update: And check out the nifty new Plancast logo.

It’s no secret that VeriFone hopes to eliminate mobile startup Square before it even officially launches. Not only did they unveil their PAYware Mobile credit card-reading device just a week after Square made headlines with its unveiling, but they almost immediately started a major advertising push in places such as New York City cabs. And now they have perhaps their strongest weapon yet in the fight: placement in Apple stores.

Starting this month, Apple retails stores around the country will begin selling the PAYware Mobile reader (which is required for the accompanying app to work). It will also be sold through Apple’s online store. VeriFone CEO Doug Bergeron disclosed this information during VeriFone’s conference call yesterday afternoon.

Obviously, this placement could potentially mean a lot for VeriFone. It’s one thing to advertise your product, and say you can buy it online, it’s another to say you can go to an Apple Store and pick up the entire package in one fell-swoop (iPhone + PAYware Mobile reader). Bergeron also noted that the company plans to introduce PAYware mobile editions for Android, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile. While Square is also currently iPhone (or iPod touch)-only, the card reader itself was made to plug into a headphone jack so it should work on a variety of mobile platforms eventually.

Square, while yet to formally launch, is currently being tested by a number of partners. We’ve used it a few times to accept donations, and have been very pleased with the results. PAYware Mobile also seems pretty solid. This should be an interesting battle.

Here’s the key parts from Bergeron’s comments:

Let’s move on now to our PAYware mobile initiative. The iPhone version of this complete end-to-end payment solution comprise of a VeriShield Protect-enabled card encryption sleeve, an Apple-certified software app, and payment gateway service, commenced shipment in the last week of January. Channel development is key to this initiative’s success. To better reach individual and small business end users, we have launched a highly-effective marketing campaign that has garnered the attention of the national press, including Newsweek, CNN Money, and Fox Business news. We have also made progress in working with our traditional processor and financial institution partners to support this initiative and we will be making key announcement shortly.

In addition, we have established PAYware mobile gateway processing relationships with over 70 ISOs to-date, allowing them to assist existing or new (inaudible) customers in processing payment via the iPhone. Finally, and importantly, customers will also be able to purchase our PAYware mobile solution through our paywaremobile.comdirect sales site, which provide – which forwards transactions to one of five blue-chip processors. And starting in March, at Apple Retail Stores in the United States and the Apple Business Store online.

At the same time, we are also targeting large national, international party and in-home direct sales enterprises who may have already been outfitted with iPhones. Integrating secure, card present payments into these existing applications across hundreds of thousands of users is the next logical step. Later this year, we intend to deliver an EMV pin based version of PAYware mobile for the iPhone, allowing us to meet payment need for iPhone users worldwide. We are also planning to introduce PAYware mobile edition for Android, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile.

Late last year, we published a list of the top 10 IPO candidates of 2010.  Leading that list was Facebook, which has grown to 400 million users and is finally starting to turn on the revenue pumps as it works toward its inevitable IPO. But this evening, the Wall Street Journal published an article penned by Jessica Vascellaro that may dash the hopes of anyone who thinks that will happen in the immediate future. The lengthy piece, which is well worth reading in its entirety, touches on quite a few issues related to Facebook’s history and its future, and largely revolves around CEO Mark Zuckerberg — who doesn’t sound all that keen to take his company public.

While the article covers a lot of familiar territory about Facebook’s past, there’s plenty of new information too. Of note, the article says that Facebook executives have “discussed how revenues for 2010 could hit between $1.2 to $2 billion” — figures that exceed even the $1.1 billion InsideFacebook’s Eric Eldon reported yesterday (clearly, the number is looking big). The article also asserts that Facebook is working on a tool for sharing your physical location with Facebook (something that we’ve been hearing about for quite a while, and that I believe will be key in the future).

With regard to Facebook’s IPO, the article discusses Zuckerberg’s penchant for “delayed gratification”, which he says he has a special capacity for.  And because Zuckerberg still maintains firm control over the company, and when it will IPO, delayed gratification seems to be the law of the land.

There are also a handful of interesting anecdotes about Zuckerberg. According to the article, a Facebook engineer once wrote an internal memo called “Working With Zuck”, in which he warned other employees not to hope for much in the way of back-patting from their CEO, explaining they should not “expect acknowledgment for your role in moving the discussion forward; getting the product right should be its own reward.”

Kwedit, the innovative new alternate payment product for social games and just about any other virtual good, is on a roll. They’ve raised a second round of financing – $3.3 million in a round led by Maveron. And they were also on the Colbert Report last night. Just, not so much in a good way.

Colbert ridiculed the company as a “website that hooks little kids on borrowing credit.” You can watch the clip here.

One of Kwedit’s products is a sort of credit system. Users promise to pay back the Kwedit, and social game gives in game currency based on that promise. There’s no enforcement mechanism if the user doesn’t pay, other than a lower Kwedit score and difficulty in getting more in game Kwedit. See our overview here.

So while the Colbert clip is funny, it’s not very accurate. The company says that they absolutely do not encourage use by young children. You must be at least 13 to use Kwedit. And while Kwedit teaches users how to use credit, it’s not actually a credit product. The credit business is about charging interest over time, ideally on balances that are never fully paid off. There is no interest in Kwedit.

Kwedit says they’ve signed six new merchant contracts since launch across a variety of verticals. PokeTalk, a VoIP provider, is among them, as well as a MMO, a test prep service and a credit record protection service.

PokeTalk is using the Kwedit Direct product, which allows users to agree to pay for something online and then pay for the item by mailing in cash, or by going to a local 7-11 and paying there. Pre-paid cards also require a big up front investment in printing and distribution to get up and running.

Some of Kwedit’s partners seem to be very interested in that 7-11 angle. It’s very hard to get any kind of presence in those stores, but they can get in immediately by using Kwedit. In fact, says the company, they are seeing “tremendous interest” in the Kwedit Direct product.

Kwedit also says that they can enable charitable donations via Kwedit Direct, and neither they nor 7-11 will charge any fees for these payments. So charities looking for a new way to accept payments will likely give this a look.

As I said in our launch post, I’m very intrigued by Kwedit. It’s the only truly unique payment product I’ve seen recently and has a real chance of helping social gaming companies and other virtual goods companies increase revenue per customer in a world where only 1-3% of users are willing to open their wallet. Colbert may joke about it, but Kwedit is, actually, serious business.

One look at what this watch does will tell you that it’s just a concept, and will most likely never see the light of day (no pun intended). The Aurora Watch was designed by Jihun Yeom, and features a hollow face that makes it look like you lost part of your wristwatch, until you push a button and two lasers come out of the bezel to show you the time

Here is the original: 
Concept watch tells time with frikkin’ lasers

Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant. They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school. Angel investor and entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis said as much in his recent talk to Penn State students. And after meeting Wharton students, VC Fred Wilson expressed shock when a professor told him that you could teach people to be entrepreneurs. Wilson wrote, “I’ve been working with entrepreneurs for almost 25 years now and it is ingrained in my mind that someone is either born an entrepreneur or is not.”

Jason, Fred, and Silicon Valley VCs, I’ve got news for you: you’ve got it all wrong. Entrepreneurs aren’t born, they’re made. And they aren’t anything like you think they are. My team surveyed 549 successful entrepreneurs. We found that the majority didn’t have entrepreneurial parents. They didn’t even have entrepreneurial aspirations while going to school. They simply got tired of working for others, had a great idea they wanted to commercialize, or woke up one day with an urgent desire to build wealth before they retired. So they took the big leap.

We found that 52% of the successful entrepreneurs were the first in their immediate families to start a business — just like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, and Russell Simons (Def Jam founder). Their parents were academics, lawyers, factory workers, priests, bureaucrats, etc. About 39% had an entrepreneurial father, and 7% had an entrepreneurial mother. (Some had both.)

Only a quarter caught the entrepreneurial bug when in college. Half didn’t even think about entrepreneurship, and they had little interest in it when in school.

There was no significant difference between the success factors or hurdles faced by entrepreneurs who were extremely interested in entrepreneurship in school (and who likely set up the lemonade stands) and the ones who lacked interest. But entrepreneurs with extreme interest started more companies and did it sooner. Of the 24.5% who indicated that they were “extremely interested” in becoming entrepreneurs during college, 47.1% went on to start more than two companies (as compared with 32.9% of the overall sample). Sixty-nine percent started their companies within 10 years of working for someone else (as compared to 46.8% of the rest of the sample population).

What did affect their successes?  Education — but not the college they graduate from. In a different study of the 652 CEOs and CTOs of 502 tech companies, we researched the correlation between education and the sales and headcount of companies founded. We learned that the there was a significant difference between companies started by founders with just high-school diplomas and the rest. Education provided a huge advantage. But there wasn’t a big difference between firms founded by Ivy-league graduates and the graduates of other universities.

The education and training of entrepreneurs is something that the Kauffman Foundation has been researching extensively. Over the last six years, it has invested around $50 million on academic research to understand what makes entrepreneurs tick and what policies are most conducive to entrepreneurship and to construct data bases to permit analyses of these subjects. (Kauffman has also funded some of my research at Duke, UC-Berkeley, and Harvard.) Its VP of Research, Bob Litan, says that Kauffman has learnt conclusively that entrepreneurship can be taught. The key is to provide education at “teachable moments” — when the entrepreneur is thinking about starting a venture or ready to scale it. What entrepreneurs need isn’t the type of abstract course they teach in business schools, but practical, relevant knowledge.  That’s why Kauffman created a program called Fast Trac, which has trained 300,000 entrepreneurs so far.

One of the findings of Kauffman research is that of the appx. 600,000 businesses that are started every year, less than a fraction of 1% become high-growth “scale” businesses. These new firms, especially the “scale” firms, have added all of the net incremental jobs to U.S. economy since 1980 (about 40 million), and probably account for about 1/3 of GDP growth since then. So the key to boosting economic growth is to increase the number of successful high-growth startups.  After all, the growth rate of our economy is nothing more than the aggregation of the growth of our firms.

That is why Kauffman (which has a $2 billion endowment) is investing heavily in an ambitious new program called Kauffman Labs.  This aims to dramatically increase the ability of small businesses to become big businesses. The Labs program is built around a novel idea: that highly motivated individuals with “scalable ideas” can be recruited to be entrepreneurs and to be made successful, by surrounding them with a network of other experienced entrepreneurs; sources of money; and mentors. The goal is to educate entrepreneurs and surround them with a powerful network. This is like a Y Combinator on steroids.

Anecdotal evidence also shows that there are many more factors at play than that of genes. Note this BusinessWeek article about waves of spinoffs from Google. I doubt that all of these Google employees who are starting successful businesses were born with entrepreneurial genes. VC and former entrepreneur Brad Feld also blogged about how many of his frat buddies at MIT had become successful entrepreneurs. Were all of these people born to be entrepreneurs as well? I don’t think so. It is probably education, exposure to entrepreneurship, and networks that led these people to pursue the entrepreneurial path — which means that Kauffman Foundation may have hit on the right idea with Kauffman Labs.

The reason this topic is really important is that, as Wilson writes, “Venture Capital is a lot about pattern recognition”. The reality is that VCs like him make quick judgments about people based on the stereotypes in their minds. So, like the women that I wrote about in my previous posts, we may be disadvantaging another important segment of our population – a segment that is older, more humble, more sensible, and more realistic than the population that is getting all the attention (and the money).

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

About three weeks ago, eBay’s electronic payments daughter PayPal suddenly started blocking personal payments going in or coming out of accounts from Indian customers, resulting in a flood of online complaints from the latter that ranged from accusations of racism to sheer amateurism.

Last week, rumors that PayPal was actually forced into halting personal payments by Reserve Bank Of India (RBI) because they did not comply with all relevant regulatory requirements, were confirmed. Last night, PayPal posted a status update on its corporate blog, saying that they anticipate to resume part of its service, namely bank withdrawal abilities, as of Wednesday, March 3rd.

From the blog post:

We have been diligently working with the RBI and our business partners to resume Indian bank withdrawals for the thousands of Indian businesses who use PayPal to sell their goods or services in the global marketplace.

I’m pleased to tell you that the RBI has now allowed us to resume bank withdrawals for settlements for exports of goods and services. We are currently making changes to comply with Indian regulations for settlements for exports of goods and services, and we anticipate that as of Wednesday, March 3rd, we will be able to resume the bank withdrawal service.

As part of the changes, Indian customers will be required to fill out a new field dubbed ‘Export Code’ when they request a withdrawal (here’s how to get one). This information is apparently required under current Indian laws in order to identify the nature of cross-border merchant transactions. PayPal will share specific instructions on how users can move money into bank accounts on Monday, March 1st.

But Reserve Bank Of India has informed the eBay company that it requires specific approvals to allow personal inward remittances to India, which it currently does not have. In other words: PayPal is still forced by law to effectively suspend personal payments going into the accounts of its Indian customers for the foreseeable future, unless they are exporters.

We’ll provide an update when that changes.

One of the more frustrating things about shopping for electronics is the fact that many devices don’t hold their value for very long — you can’t typically buy a cell phone and expect to sell it for $200 a year later. At least, that’s how it used to be. Now Palo Alto-based startup Ztail is teaming with online mobile phone retailer LetsTalk to do exactly that for mobile phones: buy a phone through LetsTalk, and Ztail will tell you on the spot exactly how much money they’ll give you 18 months down the line if you want to sell it back.

Here’s how it works. LetsTalk now features a ‘ValueLock’ banner for the vast majority of its phones, including popular devices like the Motorola Droid (ValueLock is essentially a branded version of Ztail’s service). Each phone has a ValueLock Price, which is the amount Ztail will pay if you decide to send in your phone up to 18 months later (this price is the same no matter when you send in your phone, up to the 18 month cutoff). The catch is that in order to redeem your ValueLock deal, you have to purchase your next phone through LetsTalk too. The site appears to have competitive prices, so this shouldn’t be a huge deal.

From what I can tell, Ztail is offering up some good prices for the used phones. The ValueLock price for a Droid is set at $196, which is nearly $150 more than you pay for the phone up front with a 2-year Verizon contract (and remember, you’re going to get that after using the phone for 18 months). After sending in your device, Ztail sends you your money either through check or PayPal. And CEO Bill Hudak says that trade-in phones don’t have to be in mint condition either — it just can’t have obvious flaws like water damage, cracks, and missing buttons. And, in the event that Ztail goes under some time after you buy your phones, LetsTalk will still back these pricing guarantees.

So how does Ztail make money from this? First, they receive a commission for every user that buys a phone and then decides to sign up for the ValueLock service, which only requires an Email address and takes a few seconds to do. Hudak says that during a trial run 30% of customers who were eligible for ValueLock signed up for it (they’re prompted to both by an Email from LetsTalk and a card sent alongside each device). Ztail also gets a substantially larger second commission down the line if the customer sends in their device through ValueLock and purchases their next phone through LetsTalk.

This is big news for Ztail — LetsTalk is one of the web’s largest phone retailers, with over $100 million a year in revenue and hundreds of thousands of activated phones sold each year. Ztail has been working on this pseudo-insurance model for nearly a year, and it also has more large partnerships in the works (it’s also worth pointing out that LetsTalk powers the mobile device store on WalMart.com, so it’s possible that their partnership may extend there) . Prior to launching this business model, Ztail had previously focused on streamlining eBay listings and also launched a ‘Kelley Blue Book For Everything” in 2008.

If you’d like to try out the system for yourself, Ztail is going to offer a $230 ValueLock price on the new Motorola Devour to TechCrunch readers (use the code ‘TCDEVOUR’ when you sign up for the service). The normal ValueLock price for the phone is $168. You can read our review of the Devour here.