Category: Tech news

We’re in the thick of a presidential election year here in the United States, which means that Democrats and Republicans are at each others’ throats even more than usual as each party fights to win votes. But even now, there is still one political issue that both sides have to get behind in order to stay in voters’ good graces: Job creation.

And since so many jobs these days are created by startups and small businesses, a number of politicians have started championing initiatives to make it easier for people to start their own companies. One such example is the Startup Act, co-authored by Republican Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas and Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia.

TechCrunch TV had the opportunity to sit down with Senator Moran this past weekend at the South By Southwest Interactive conference in Austin, Texas, where he was speaking about the Startup Act and meeting with entrepreneurs from all over the country. We were able to get his insights on why creating startups is a bipartisan issue, how Silicon Valley should engage with Washington, D.C., and much more. The entire video interview is embedded above, but here are just a few of Moran’s points:

The US needs global talent

“[The Startup Act aims] to encourage people who are educated here, who perhaps grew up in a foreign country but now have a Master’s or a Ph.D. in engineering, science, or mathematics, that they can obtain visas to remain in the United States. Or, if you have some entrepreneurial ability and you want to bring that entrepreneurship to the United States, you can bring it here. If you will agree to put people to work in our country, we want you in the United States.”

Small businesses need less paperwork

“Startups can’t afford to be hiring a lot of lawyers and accountants to handle all the government stuff that comes their way.”

Startups go beyond tech

“Entrepreneurship in the United States is broad. It could be starting a sandwich shop… it is a wide array of things. Although, technology is certainly at the forefront of job creation, entrepreneurship and innovation in the country. It’s one of the reasons that I quickly got involved in the battle against SOPA and PIPA. As you look at, what do we do to grow the economy and have innovation and entrepreneurship, technology became front and center. Yet we had potential legislation that would have stifled the ability and certainly driven up the costs and reduced the chances of success for those who have entrepreneurial ideas in regard to technology.

So, technology is a huge component of it. But it is much broader. It’s the opportunity to market and to sell and to produce lots of things across the country. All we need is people with ideas who have a shot at success.”

Founders: Call your Congressperson

“It’s a shame in my view that so much of whether or not an entrepreneur or business person has success has to do with Washington, D.C. I wish that wasn’t the case. I wish that you didn’t have to try to influence policy in our nation’s capital, but the reality is you do. I would encourage the tech community to reach out to elected officials and tell them their story, tell them about their success, what their hurdles have been. Develop a relationship with elected officials… There’s plenty of evidence that when the tech community does engage they can have a victory.”

Pushing the issue past party lines

“What we want to avoid is this concept becoming a Republican idea or a Democrat idea. It’s an American idea. We are great entrepreneurs. We have a history in this country of taking ideas to market and succeeding.

…The kind of stuff that we’re talking about, I would guess 80 percent of Congress would agree upon. And what you have to avoid is those who want to engage in these issues either to see them succeed or fail based on the politics. Trying to make certain that the other side — unfortunately we’ve developed sides in politics — that the other side doesn’t have a victory. That’s a terrible development, and we ought to be much more about what’s good for Americans, what’s good for the United States, as opposed to what’s good for a political party.”

For all the cool things an iPad can coaxed into doing, I find myself using mine to read more than anything else (rewatching old episodes of Doctor Who on Netflix is a close second). I’ve been begun to use it more than my trusty Kindle, and thanks to the timely 3.0 update for the iOS Kindle app, organizing and managing all of those books I’ve bought feels a lot snappier.

Take navigating your archived books, for example. A quick tap on the Cloud button at the bottom of the screen jumps into a listing of purchased-but-not-yet-downloaded content. Scrolling though all of them seems appreciably quicker, and all it takes to get back to the books saved on the device is a tap on the (what else?) device button next to it.

The library view has also been cleaned up a bit — gone is the now-classic “kid reading a book under a tree” image, replaced with an Kindle Fire-esque gray background This new look also permeates the app’s iPhone version, which includes the thumbnail grid list that iPad users have enjoyed for a while now.

Unfortunately, many of us won’t be able to take advantage of one of the app’s biggest tweaks for a little while longer. The Kindle app packs support for the new iPad’s ridiculous Retina Display, so the rest of us who aren’t MG Siegler will have to play with it tomorrow.

The update is live in the App Store now, so the persnickety bibliophiles among you can get cracking.

I’ve been excited about Angry Birds Space since before I even knew about it. It’s like that awful Savage Garden song: “I think I dreamed it into life.” The only thing is that I didn’t dream it into life; Peter Vesterbacka and his amazing team at Rovio did. And after getting a sneak peek at the latest and greatest Angry Birds, I can confidently say that this will be the best version to date.

Vesterbacka has said it before, but he made it very clear again this morning that Angry Birds Space is set to be Rovio’s biggest launch ever. Merchandise, including plush toys that we have sitting here in the office, will be available right on launch day, March 22. Rovio has also created a comprehensive guide to Angry Birds Space in collaboration with The Daily, complete with new character profiles, info on space, and detailed explanations from NASA on the physics of the game.

Speaking of the game, Angry Birds Space is fundamentally different from previous versions when it comes to game play. Since space just so happens to be a zero-gravity environment, the idea of catapulting birds into pig-filled structures doesn’t translate so easily. But that’s kind of the point.

Angry Birds Space uses strategically placed gravity wells and planetary bodies to direct your birds, rather than an even gravitational pull. This paired with new characters and one of the most beautiful Angry Birds settings I’ve ever seen should make for yet another Rovio hit.

Vesterbacka noted that Rovio is much more than a gaming company, it’s a “next-generation entertainment franchise.” And the company is more than a game maker, indeed.

On our way down to the lobby post-interview, the Mighty Eagle mentioned that Rovio is trying to leverage the Chinese market as much as possible. He said the number of copy cat Angry Birds products in China is more flattering than frustrating, and that the company only ever intervenes when a copy cat is hurting the brand. He used the example of a coffee cup maker using lead to build the Angry Birds-style mug.

“I think [people in China] see that we understand the counterfeiting culture of the country and appreciate that we want to be a part of it, and in turn, they’d rather buy our products than the knockoffs,” said Vesterbacka. Rovio plans on having at least 200 retail locations up and running in China by the end of this year/early next year.

Speaking of yearly goals, Rovio will have four more Angry Birds titles (not including Angry Birds Space) available on iOS and Android by the end of 2012. That’s one helluva busy year, if you ask me.

Rovio’s been staffing up as of late, growing from 50 employees to a current 200 Rovio workers. The office in Beijing should also be growing from a handful to around 50 in the coming months, and Vesterbacka said he’s definitely interested in scooping up some of those copycat product designers.

Long story short, Rovio isn’t going to fizzle out anytime soon.

“We always try to surprise and really delight our fans,” said Vesterbacka. “What you can expect from us is the unexpected.”

(Editors’ Note: This is an updated version of an earlier video, which we are just re-publishing now. So if you saw this post before and are wondering why it’s here again, you’re not going crazy. Our apologies.)

The Kinect’s powerful depth- and position-sensing sensors have been put to many a noble purpose: basic artificial vision, translating sign language, controlling humanoid robots, and real-time 3D mapping of the real world. But at last it can help you pick out a pair of jeans.

You may not be aware of the alarming fact that up to 40% of clothing purchased is returned because of poor fit. Something must be done! Thoughtfully, they contracted with British body-mapping firm (it’s a thing) Bodymetrics to provide an in-store service using Kinects that analyzes and categorizes your body, the better to find you clothes that fit. At long last, our global nightmare of loose jeans is over.

You step into the pod, where eight Kinect sensors arranged “in a circle” (we presume they mean an octagon) produce a detailed 3D map of your body in just five seconds. It’s a bit like what they do to you at the airport, but without all the radiation.

Once you’ve been scanned in (and created your Bodymetrics account, obviously), your body is classified into one of three non-judgmental-sounding groups: emerald, sapphire, or ruby. You can then check out jeans and other items in-store or use the body map online to match yourself with sizes and styles that complement your body. Don’t bring your preconceived notions of gems with you, though, this is a safe place for all cuts, from brilliant to teardrop.

I joke, but body mapping and augmented shopping like this really promises to be a huge space in the next decade as online sales continue to erode retail. The beginning stages may be a little ridiculous, but that’s often the case with emerging technologies. The Bloomingdale’s pods will be available until the end of the weekend.

Children of the 80s will fondly remember the Neo Geo, probably as the unattainable, super-expensive console that existed only in arcades and wishful dreams. For more than two decades it has remained so, and in addition to the arcade machines littering the world still, the console has engendered a fervent fanbase of sprite-loving nostalgia hounds.

SNK discontinued the hardware years ago, but the internet is a wonderful place where even the sparsest population of enthusiasts can gather together and create a meaningful market. In this case, Neo Geo fans appear to still be numerous enough that both a new handheld version of the console and a real-life new game on cartridge are being released.

The Neo Geo X is a handheld rather like the Supaboy and Retro-bit devices: a blast from the past made not to be a blockbuster gaming device but simply to turn a modest profit and capitalize on a small but energetic fanbase. It has just been confirmed for UK and US distribution, though at around £500 (nearly $800) it may be as much beyond their grasp as it was when they were kids. At least it comes with 20 licensed games built in.

But the excitement doesn’t end there. The original companies are always game to make a buck on hardware licensing, but developers too have a healthy respect for the Neo Geo and every once in a while, a new game appears — years after the hardware has ceased being manufactured or even supported.

This week brings news of Gunlord, a great name for a game if I ever heard of one. It’s a Turrican-inspired 2D shooter, and the developers are releasing it for Neo Geo and Dreamcast (!). They’re keeping the pricing scheme intact for both systems, and the cartridge will set you back €439 — around $570 — you can pick it up for Dreamcast for less (€32). But some would say they’re both priceless.

The question is, of course, why didn’t they make the game for PC and release it on Steam or as a self-published title?

For the same reason some people still choose to write their novels on a typewriter, or paint with real brushes, or put their album out on vinyl. Sometimes the medium is the message.

It’s an amazing world where there is room for both Angry Birds selling scores of millions, and a fan-made cartridge for a long-dead system selling scores. Modern memetic distribution and the long tail in beautiful, complementary harmony.

Editor’s Note: TechCrunch columnist Semil Shah currently works at Votizen and is based in Palo Alto. You can follow him on Twitter @semil.

“In the Studio” welcomes today a successful, repeat founder in the travel space who has started and sold a company already, hails from a family of entrepreneurs, and who caught the travel bug early in life and decided to to mix his pleasure with business for his career.

After working for a bunch of consumer Internet companies back in the late 90s, Hotel Tonight CEO Sam Shank felt it was finally time to start his own thing. An avid traveler, Shank’s initial idea was to build a travel social network with a map to record the places you’ve been. He had this idea before Google Maps existed, and his team actually built their own map server and map data. After realizing it was a fun product but not a good business, Shank readjusted focus to hotel reviews an ultimately sold the business — that company was TravelPost, which was acquired by Sidestep, which then in turn was acquired by Kayak.

Fast forward to today, Shank and his team of 30 colleagues have quickly built up Hotel Tonight, an iPhone app that lets users book same-day hotels in select cities. Shank knew from his years in travel before this that travel was the biggest e-commerce category (and that lodging was the biggest within that category), that set up costs were low, but that scaling after success was incredibly hard. Despite how dead-simple Hotel Tonight is (book a room from your phone on the day you need it), Shank kicked around ideas for the better part of a year, interviewing industry people and scouting opportunities. Eventually, the idea hit him and he realized that no one else focused exclusively on same-day mobile bookings — so he went for it. The resulting app has received a warm welcome, and if you’re feeling spontaneous on your next trip to Vegas, you can roll the dice and see if Hotel Tonight will sell you a $2,500 suite on the strip at a steep discount from the app’s “Ballin” category.

In our conversation, Shank discusses his trajectory as a “travel startup” founder and you can see how all of the years of cumulative learnings have come together for him with his current venture. Back in November 2011, I wrote a post on TechCrunch after investigating a slew of new travel startups and couldn’t find ones that were close to a business model. Hotel Tonight, by contrast, is so simple, in fact, because of his experiences and decision to focus on key areas. First, they built for mobile only, and only for iPhone. Mobile is a natural fit for same-day hotel booking, the iOS platform offered them access to a certain customer, and being mobile-only helped them differentiate from other big travel brands. The result has been a smashing success so far, and as you’ll see in this video, Shank exhibits the kind of hyper-extreme focus an entrepreneur must have in an overly crowded, competitive market.

PayPal today unveiled its new global payment platform for small and medium-sized businesses, PayPal Here. It brings the veteran payments solution into local stores with a new mobile app-card reader solution to rival Square. Rolling out to merchants today, it features a triangular card-reader, or dongle, that merchants can use to swipe cards of all varieties to start accepting mobile payments on-the-go — but all users need is their phones, via a startup named Card.io.

The startup, which unveiled its own consumer-facing app back in January, allows merchants to make the payment process as frictionless as possible. Available for both iPhone and Android, it provides mobile app developers a way to let consumers make purchases simply by holding the credit card up to the phone’s camera. As the company announced today on its blog, its new partnership with PayPal allows merchants to accept credit cards without readers or extra hardware: “Merchants can immediately begin accepting credit cards with nothing but a phone … We’re excited to be working with PayPal and we hope that this partnership will improve mobile commerce for both consumers and merchants.”

Check out Card.io’s blog post here.

Last week we announced some pretty impressive TechCrunch Disrupt New York veterans who will be back on the stage this year. Today we’re revealing more of our stellar lineup for May’s big event.

Joining our all star cast will be co-founder of Founder Collective and CEO of recently acquired Hunch, Chris Dixon, as well as Fab founder and CEO, Jason Goldberg. Andreessen Horowitz general partner and former CEO of  Open Table, Jeff Jordan will share his investment perspective and David Lawee, Google’s Head of Corporate Development who our own Michael Arrington told all startups with dreams of being bought by Google to stalk, round out this week’s speaker announcements.

While our amazing speakers are the cornerstone of Disrupt, the Startup Battlefield is the crew we look forward to seeing introduced by that dramatic Disrupt music. Will your company be one of the 30 to launch the new hotness on the Disrupt stage? Applications are being accepted now for this year’s Battlefield and close on Sunday, April 1st, at 11:59pm Pacific.

Disrupt NYC kicks off on May 19th with our 24-hour Hackathon, with the main event starting May 21st and going through the 23rd. Stay tuned as we’ll reveal more of what’s in store for Manhattan in May. Get your tickets now.

If you’d like to become a part of the Disrupt experience and learn about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Jeanne Logozzo and Leslie Hitchcock for more information.

Chris Dixon
CEO and Co-founder, Hunch

Chris Dixon currently works as the CEO and Co-founder of Hunch. He is also a contributing writer for TechCrunch. He previously was the CEO and Co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee. Chris is a personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype, TrialPay, DocVerse, Invite Media, Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Panjiva, Knewton, and a handful of other startups that are still in stealth mode. In addition to his personal investments, Chris is also a co-founder of Founder’s Collective and the host of TechCrunch TV’s Founder Stories.

David Lawee
VP Corporate Development, Google

David Lawee was named vice president of corporate development at Google in February 2008. Previously Lawee was vice president, Marketing, at Google. He had global responsibility for all Google marketing activities. His worldwide mandate encompassed product marketing, field marketing, customer analytics, creative and advertising, as well as directing all of Google’s regional marketing groups in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia-Pacific and Latin America.

Initially hired to expand Corporate Development at Google, David brings significant entrepreneurial and general management experience to his role. David co-founded Xfire, a leading online gaming community, where he led product development, marketing and international business development. Within 2 years of launch, Xfire became the fastest growing Internet gaming site with over 5 million registered users. Xfire was sold to Viacom in early 2006.

Jeff Jordan
General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz

Jeff is general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Jeff has been CEO and remains an active board member of OpenTable, which has transformed the restaurant industry with 20,000 restaurants and 200 million diners served. Before that, Jeff ran PayPal, the definitive online payments company of the Internet era, resulting in a business with 133 million user accounts and $38 billion of payment volume when he left. And before that, Jeff ran eBay North America for five years, where he helped build eBay into the Internet’s leading e-commerce company and led eBay’s successful and transformative acquisitions of PayPal and Half.com.

Jason Goldberg
Founder and CEO, Fab.com

Jason Goldberg is the founder and CEO of Fab.com. Fab is the fastest growing e-commerce site on the planet. Each day Fab features daily design inspirations and sales across all verticals at all price points.

We’re at the PayPal event in San Francisco today where the ePayments giant has officially pulled back the curtain on its payment solution for small businesses. The news has been trickling out over the last few weeks now, as Leena reported last week on the fact that the company was prepping for the launch of an in-store payments system focused on smaller merchants. And that they have, with PayPal Here. While it remained unclear what exactly the technology was going to look like, today it’s become fully apparent that PayPal (even if not explicitly) is taking dead aim at Square.

And for good reason, Jack Dorsey’s mobile payment solution has been blowing up of late, but PayPal thinks it is going to have a leg-up on the competition due to its history and experience in the payment space. After 14 years and having attracted over 100 million customers, operating in more than 190 countries, PayPal has a sizable network. It also helps that PayPal’s new global payments solution is nearly universal in the type of payments it accepts.

But PayPal’s new in-store dongle is literally the triangle to Square’s, well, Square. Just like the rest, the triangular add-on just plugs into the headphone jack on your smartphone. Merchants can then accept payments by swiping cards with the thumb-sized card reader, or — and this is a highlight — simply use the smartphone’s camera to scan credit cards (powered by Card.io), scan checks, etc. This saves merchants from having to type in credit card numbers at the point of sale. They can just invoice directly from the mobile app, or, naturally, accept PayPal. It even has “a little wing” that pulls down right over the top to stabilize the card reader as merchants swipe.

Merchants who apply will be given a business debit card, too, to access their funds, with 1 percent cash back on all eligible purchases. PayPal Here offers a flat rate of 2.7 percent for card swipes, and although media has focused on that high percentage, PayPal is quick to point out that, with the 1 percent cash back, total fees are decreased to 1.7 percent.

The last part of this is that PayPal has today released an update to its iPhone app, its popular consumer app with the “Local” feature that allows consumers to use geo-location to find the merchants that accept PayPal in their local area. With this new update, consumers can open the app, tell the merchant they’re in store and ready to pay, and the merchant can then just find their picture, name and information, which is already in PayPal’s system, and voila, no wallet or card needed. Yes, it works just like Square’s Card Case, which was introduced last year.

This has the potential to be a really powerful complement to PayPal Here, essentially allowing PayPal to bypass NFC or QR codes or any other form of mobile payment tech, simply with the geolocation features of customer smartphones and their massive network. This especially true considering that PayPal Vice President of Mobile Dave Marcus said today that it’s going to be pushing it’s consumer iPhone app “really hard” to its existing customers. If they can up the adoption of this app, it’s going to make payments even easier for small merchants.

Today, PayPal is going to be shipping PayPal Here to a few thousand merchants, with full-scale roll-out coming in the next few months. PayPal believes this can be a “game changer,” words that were repeated today during its presentation. With quick-pay, 24/7 support, PCI compliance — a lot of this stuff has been in PayPal’s wheelhouse for years now. It was only a matter of time before PayPal got into the small business game, and now they’re trying to do so with a bang.

So rumor (and Twitter) has it that singer Britney Spears was at Path yesterday, hanging with founder Dave Morin in their spacious offices — and actually sitting at the Path boardroom table.

The popular popstar has created a Path account, which is sort of counterintuitive as the mobile social network only limits you to 150 friends. This was Spears’, who has over 14 million followers on Twitter, first time visiting Silicon Valley.

Rumor also has it that Path is raising a Series B round of funding, wanting to bring in between $25 million to $30 million at a $250 million valuation. Existing investors and Khosla and Greylock have expressed interest amidst an environment that is producing many high-profile Series B raises.

The company has previously raised a total of $11.2 million in angel and Series A funding from Index Ventures, First Round Capital, Founders Fund, SV Angel, Crunchfund and others. It recently experienced unprecedented scale, due to a successful pivot.

AllThingsD is reporting that super-founder Kevin Rose is joining Google. Well, that’s part of the story … the other part is that the entire Milk team, including Rose, will be joining the search giant, in an acqui-hire type deal.

Google is not picking up the Oink app itself or the technology. Rumor has it that Rose and the crew will be heavily involved in Google’s continuing social efforts.

We’re also hearing that Milk’s investors were happy with the deal, the price of which was somewhere in the range of $15 million to $30 million. The price was driven up through Milk’s negotiations with Facebook, which also wanted the incredibly talented team of eight.

Milk, which raised a total of $1.7 million from Dave Morin, Philip Rosedale, Evan Williams, Shervin Pishevar and others was experimenting with a new model of app iteration.

The Oink app itself shut down yesterday.

Social media monitoring platform Brandwatch has raised $6 million from Nauta Capital and current shareholders, including PR distribution company Gorkana Group. Brandwatch’s system reads and summarizes what’s being said on the web about brands, people and products against defined keywords. The brands can then respond, but also analyze trends, campaigns and competitors. This is a space typically populated by the likes of Radian 6 and to some extent others such as Conversocial. Carles Ferrer of Nauta joins the board with colleague Al Sisto.

Brandwatch now plans to expand further in the the US and EMEA, Latin America and South East Asia. Currently it has 300 companies using its platform, including global companies like HSBC, DDB, Ipsos and Mediacom. Founded in 2007 by CEO Giles Palmer, Brandwatch is based in Brighton, UK, with offices in New York and Germany.

Palmer says “we started as a small bunch of geeks that lived by the sea with a passion for technology and innovation… The funding means we can focus on leading the market with innovative products and hire more of the right people.”

Nauta Capital manages three funds and has offices in Barcelona and Boston and has $230 million under management.

Cloud-based invoicing platform (and TechCrunch Disrupt finalist) InvoiceASAP is out with some very welcome news for business owners and their accountants today: integration with QuickBooks. The new functionality works with both QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online, but here’s the killer feature – the proprietary solution supports syncing with QuickBooks as far back as 2004. Even QuickBooks’ maker Intuit itself, only supports back to 2009.

“No one has this,” says InvoiceASAP CEO Paul Hoeper of the new feature, “no one.”

Also new, the company’s updated mobile solution now includes support for mobile payment technology Card.io, which lets businesses “scan” credit cards without using a dongle.

The QuickBooks support will be great news for business owners. A lot of people out there are still doing manual entries, or at the very least, manual imports, into QuickBooks today. There are some expensive custom solutions, especially in larger organizations, that allow for synchronization on the level that InvoiceASAP is offering, but nothing that’s widely available.

“Everyone’s in denial. People believe that there must be a way to connect to QuickBooks, but the reality is, there really isn’t,” explains Hoeper. ”Intuit themselves support their own connections going back to 2009 for the desktop version [via GoPayment].”

The issue has to do with the QuickBooks SDK itself, he explains. It doesn’t support going too far back in the past – a function of Intuit trying to force its users down the upgrade path. So InvoiceASAP had to write their own solution, in the form of downloadable software, in order to support the new functionality. It’s available now for $10/month and is supported in the InvoiceASAP iOS app, with Android support planned for later this month.

In addition, QuickBooks is only one of many future integrations planned for the company. Over the coming months, the plan is to roll out support for more accounting and CRM platforms including Salesforce, Netsuite, Sage Products (Peachtree, e.g.) and others.

The company is continuing to add support for multiple payment acceptance methods, too, including PayPal (which is now available on mobile, following support on the web), Zipmark (pending), and, also new as of today, Card.io.

For those of you unfamiliar, Card.io is the mobile payments solution that allows merchants to accept credit cards via mobile devices without using a dongle. Instead of swiping cards, Card.io “reads” the card through the phone’s camera and inputs the information into the correct places within the app.

“We’re integrating our backend to all payment gateways, so a business with an existing merchant account can use that solution,” says Hoeper of the Card.io integration, ”so now you have a method to accept mobile credit cards that you can use with your existing merchant account…it’s something that’s very differentiated from Square.”

The idea with the new Card.io integration, PayPal support, planned integration with Zipmark, and all those still in the works (not yet public), is to make InvoiceASAP a payment agnostic solution for creating invoices on the fly, Hoeper explains.

The news doesn’t stop there: support for these solutions will be integrated into a forthcoming product called PayASAP.

While the company’s cloud-based invoicing service has been doing well since its reveal at Disrupt in May 2011, and subsequent launch on iOS in August (they have 5,550 registered users and host 5 million invoices in the cloud), Hoeper says they’ve been fielding demands for something that’s more of a mobile POS (point-of-sale) solution. That is, something akin to Square’s cash register iPad app, but with support for other payment methods.

The company considered making the POS system a feature within their current app, but then decided to launch a second solution instead: PayASAP will arrive April 30th (or sooner) on iOS and Android. It will be a simpler app that supports all the same mobile payment methods as the InvoiceASAP mobile solution.

Stay tuned for that. In the meantime, more details about the new integrations are available on the InvoiceASAP website here.

At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last year, Gauri Manglik, Mike Lewis, and Orion Burt launched SpotOn, a recommendation engine in app, which served its users suggested local businesses based on their friends’ activity on Foursquare, Facebook, and more. The co-founders quickly found, however, that its customers were using the app more as a social networking tool than for its recommendations. So, based on user feedback, the team changed directions and built a new app, today called Fondu.

Manglik describes the new service as “Twitter meets Yelp for restaurants,” in that the team wanted to solve Yelp’s noise problem not with more noise from Twitter, but by targeted, friendsourced recommendations. In other words, a review written on Yelp goes into a community directory, meaning that the recommendations you peruse likely come from people you don’t know, and most users want to skip past the noise right to their immediate network when looking for a new place to grab a bite. Thus, with Fondu, you only see reviews from your friends, or the most popular reviews that have been one-upped by the Fondu community.

What’s more, Fondu has officially launched a redesign that, among the new features, shows that the app is getting serious about search and discovery. The redesign includes a new search and discovery tab to replace the old “Popular” tab, which allows users to search for anything from “sushi” to “dive bar” and view relevant nearby reviews, prioritized by those written by friends. For those who remember SpotOn, the new discovery feature also resurrects a map mode that enables users to swipe through destinations on an interactive map.

Fondu users have written over 20,000 reviews of restaurants across the world (with the majority focusing on New York, San Francisco, and Seattle), and now every review on Fondu has a “bookmark” button that allows on to save the review to their own bookmark list, which is also viewable on Fondu’s map mode. This means that, as users move about town on the go, they can see the places they have saved that they either wanted to try for the first time or couldn’t wait to try again. Users also now have easy access to this list and the map of their bookmarks on the app’s “Friends Feed.”

The new Fondu also boasts the ability to snap photos to include as context in those bite-sized reviews, whether it’s a photo of the food itself, the ambience, or company, along with the ability to recommend restaurants directly to friends and family. After visiting a bar that you know your best friend will love, for example, users can simply add them in the “recommend to friends” section, which works even if they aren’t on Fondu. Users can send recommendations through email, Facebook, or Twitter.

Fondu isn’t just making its users happy though—the team has also begun partnering with restaurants like GustOrganics in NYC that are top-rated among its users, taking a cue from Zagat and others by offering restaurants the chance to display those top-rated stickers in their windows. Of course, this is all well and good, but there is plenty of competition for user attention in the foodie app space. Google’s $151 million acquisition of Zagat means that the company will be playing an important role in Google’s SoLoMo strategy, but while Zagat has plenty of brand recognition, the app is still priced at $10, so there’s plenty of room for free apps to undercut it price-wise.

That still leaves the immensely popular Yelp, as well as apps like IAC’s Urbanspoon, which offers some similar features to the fast-growing app, and Food Finder. Matchbook also offers a nifty bookmarking feature, with some great deals to boot. Plus, there’s Tasted Menu.

So, in the end, it really comes down to price, design, and whether or not your friends are actually using it. Fondu wins on pricing, and it looks great, but it’s still lacking a bit in the last area. Yelp is a monster in terms of reviews and it’s great for finding places quickly, within reach, but Fondu can beat Yelp in terms of ease of use, it’s reviews are succinct and more likely to be about restaurants you actually care about. There’s still plenty of room for a new personalized, friendsourced foodie app to be successful, but those friends have to be there (and be active) for it to win on the user experience front.

For more, check out Fondu on the App Store here and at home here.

Well, after a bit of a false start, Samsung finally seems to have done it. According to a new blog post on the official Samsung Tomorrow blog, the Korean consumer electronics giant has finally begun to push their Ice Cream Sandwich update out to the Galaxy S IIs of the world.

And with that, Galaxy S II owners began once again to feel the love. Or at least, most of them did. The update in question is meant for international spec Galaxy S II (the GT-I9100), so State-side owners of a AT&T/T-Mobile Galaxy S II or a Sprint Epic 4G Touch won’t be joining in the official fun just yet.

Aside from going live in the company’s native Korea later today, users in Poland, Hungary, and Sweden will be among the first to get the long-awaited update via the Kies software manager. Rest assured that other markets will soon follow, though Samsung doesn’t get any more specific than that.

In their official announcement, Samsung has also confirmed that the Ice Cream Sandwich update will “follow soon” for the Galaxy Note, Galaxy S II LTE, and the 8.9 and 10.1-inch Galaxy Tabs. On top of that, Samsung will soon push out new updates that bring features like Face Unlock and a revamped photo editor to devices like the Galaxy S (and its Super Clear LCD variant), Galaxy Tab 7, Galaxy S Plus, and the Galaxy W.

Though there’s no word yet on when any of these updates will hit, expect Samsung to mistakenly announce it on their Indonesian portal before pulling the post and telling people to watch their Twitter account for news instead.