Venmo Touch Will Help Chicago's Braintree Bump Mobile Transactions Past $2 Billion A Year
Braintree, a payments gateway that’s backed by Accel Partners and NEA, sounds like it has effectively doubled the volume of mobile transactions it sees per year to $2 billion. It now touts 40 million credit card accounts in its vault. How does that compare to competitors? eBay, which operates Paypal, said it had 123 million registered accounts in its last earnings filing and that it expects to generate about $20 billion of mobile commerce and payments volume. So while Braintree is still smaller, it’s one of the few notable upstart companies in the space. Y Combinator’s Stripe is the other one with its formidable concentration of technical talent. Braintree made waves last year when it acquired Venmo, a New York-based mobile payments startup that made it easy and frictionless to transfer cash back and forth via texts and e-mail. The company kept Venmo’s brand name when it launched a series of products including Venmo Touch, which makes it easy for consumer to store their payments ...
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Braintree Shifts Its Attention To Mobile, International Markets By Poaching From Google Wallet
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.
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Free Google-Sponsored Boingo WiFi Comes To 4,000 U.S. Locations (But Not For iOS Users)
Boingo just announced that Google Play is now sponsoring free WiFi at 4,000 hotspots, including a number of major airports like New York's JFK, Chicago's O'Hare and Seattle-Tacoma, as well as Manhatten subway stations and "thousands of hotels, shopping malls, cafés and recreational areas." This free service is scheduled to last through September, but it's worth noting that Google and Boingo are explicitly noting that only Android phones and tablets, as well as Windows and Macintosh laptops will be able to make use of this service.
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Give The Gift Of Startups: Just Because Lets You Give Freebies To Friends From The Startups You Love
Are you dying to tell your friends about all the new startups you read about on TechCrunch? A newly launched iOS application called Just Because is now making that possible. With Just Because, you can offer your friends a free gift from a startup - like $20 at Uber, for example, or a free lip gloss at Birchbox or a free t-shirt at JackThreads. And what's even better is that each gift only costs a dollar to send. Why only a dollar? Because startups are more than happy to give away some freebies here and there with the hopes of converting those first-time users into lifetime customers. They can factor in the costs of doing so into their customer acquisition budgets. Already, several companies are on board to give Just Because a shot, including Uber, BirchBox, TaskRabbit, Warby Parker, Trunk Club, Jack Threads, BetaBrand, MoxieJean, Bespoke Post, and Cheeky Chicago.
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