Friday, July 27, 2012PayDragon Reveals $1.35M Seed Funding For Mobile PaymentsLos Angeles-based PayDragon has raised $1.35M in its seed funding, the firm disclosed Friday. The firm--which had earlier disclosed the seed round, but without dollar amounts--said the funding included Rustic Canyon Ventures, SV Angel, and Y Combinator, as well as Yuri Milner and Mark Schwartz. PayDragon is led by Hamilton Chan, and is aimed at making it easier for users to pay for local items using their mobile phone. The company is a refinement of Paperlinks, the QR-code based marketing firm s (More info...)
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Unique Way To Name Your Company: Run A PollHere's a unique way to figure out a name for your company: run a public survey vetting some of the possible names for your startup. One of the companies out of San Diego's EvoNexus incubator sent out an email Friday via EvoNexus, saying that it's looking for a new name to offer up a service to provide customer care over social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. The company--Face It Corp., which apparently is running it business under a different brand name--asks such questions as what name (More info...)
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Wonderville Takes On Educational Content For KidsA new, Los Angeles startup, Wonderville has launched to take on curating educational content on the web, providing links and videos to different content on a wide range of educational content for K-8 education. The company said this morning that it is looking to create "smart galleries" of digital content and videos around educational topics like history, science, popular culture, and more. The founders are Mark Eastwood, David Lenz, and Lawrence Leach, who all apparently are vets of the origina (More info...)
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Interview with Jerry Jao, Retention ScienceHow to you better convert web visitors into customers? That's exactly what Retention Science (www.retentionscience.com), the latest firm out of the MuckerLab accelerator, helps e-commerce companies do. Jerry Jao, the CEO of Retention Science, tells us how the firm is using big data to help e-commerce firms convert more customers. Retention Science is venture backed by Baroda Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Double M Partners, as well as a long list of local angel investors (Paige Craig, Bong Ko (More info...)
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CallFire Powers Congressional CampaignSanta Monica-based CallFire, the Internet telephony service headed by Dinesh Ravishanker, is powering the campaign of Seattle congressional candidate Darcy Burner, the firm said Thursday. CallFire said that Burner is using the firm's cloud-based telephony platform to power voice and text messaging communications, plus connecting staff and volunteers from any PC or mobile phone instead of an expensive telephone call center. Financial details of the win were not disclosed. CallFire said its platfo (More info...)
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AtomicMe Connects Social Networking, Revenue SharingA new, Los Angeles startup, AtomicMe, said this week that it is looking to tie together social networking activity with the interests users are passionate about--by sharing advertising revenues with those users. AtomicMe said it will pay 30% of the net advertising revenue generated through impressions on the site, for any user that can attract more than 100,000 unique visitors to a page within a month. The startup is the brainchild of Jeremy Jason.
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