Circle Raises $9M Series A From Accel And General Catalyst To Make Bitcoins Mainstream

Circle Internet Financial has launched with $9M of Series A funding to increase mainstream adoption of digital currencies like Bitcoin by providing a payment platform for consumers and merchants. Investors include Jim Breyer, Accel Partners and General Catalyst Partners. All three invested in Circle founder Jeremy Allaire’s previous startup Brightcove, an online video platform that went public in 2012. Circle is a payment platform that wants to make it easy for businesses and consumers to use Bitcoin and other digital currencies. Despite its association with Deep Web black market Silk Road, as well as concerns over its stability, more consumers and companies are beginning to show interest in Bitcoins because they can facilitate online payments at lower costs and with greater security and privacy than existing electronic payment methods. One potential draw for merchants is avoiding the fees and risks of fraud and chargebacks associated with credit cards. For consumers, Circle says it is building a secure platform that will protect consumer privacy. For businesses and charities, it will provide tools and services that enable them to accept digital currency payments with no transaction fees. Circle’s Series A is one of the largest–if not the largest–amounts of funding secured so far by a digital currency startup. Other Bitcoin-based companies that have recently landed significant investment include Coinbase, which raised a $5 million Series A led by Union Square Ventures, and BitPay, which has received about $2.5 million to date from Founders Fund and various angel investors. Other startups that have recently launched to take advantage of the increasing interest in Bitcoin include London-based Bitcoin exchange Coinfloor; music jukebox hack Beatcoin; micropayment platform BitWall; and whitelabel exchange Buttercoin. In order for companies like Circle to be successful, however, they will have to allay concerns about regulatory issues. As Shakil Khan, founder of Bitcoin news Web site CoinDesk, pointed out last week during a Disrupt Berlin panel, average customers want to see some kind of regulation before they adopt Bitcoin. On the other hand, there are potential opportunities for digital currency companies around the world. For example, China’s government is beginning to show interest in Bitcoins (and a division of Chinese Internet giant Baidu recently started accepting Bitcoin payments). Circle is based in Boston, with international operations headquartered in Dublin, Ireland. The company is regulated by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), a bureau of the U.S. Department of Treasury, as a money transmitter and is seeking state licenses. John Beccia, the former chief regulatory counsel for the Financial Services Roundtable in Washington, D.C., will also serve as Circle’s general counsel and chief compliance officer. Allaire also co-founded of Allaire Corporation, creators of Web development language ColdFusion. Allaire Corp. was acquired by Macromedia in 2001, where Allaire became CTO and helped oversee the creation of a Flash-based application platform. “Bitcoin and digital currency represent a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shape the future of the Internet and global commerce,” said Alliare in a statement. “There’s a tremendous opportunity to make payments easier, more secure and less costly for consumers and businesses. Digital currency can dramatically reduce the friction and costs currently experienced in the world by merchants and consumers.” Jim Breyer, Partner at Accel Partners, will join Circle’s board of directors, as well as David Orfao of General Catalyst Partners. “The dramatic global growth in mobile, social and online commerce is creating the need and potential for a real global digital currency. With Jeremy’s vision for Circle and track record as an Internet pioneer, the opportunity here is to potentially build a significant global company,” said Breyer.

Runtastic Releases Scary, Exciting “Story Running” To Encourage Your Ploddings

Runtastic, an Austrian running startup with an aim of hitting the Polars and Nikes of the world where it counts, has released something it's calling “Story Running,” essentially an app that tracks your run and replays an audio story that becomes more exciting as you approach the high points of an interval run. There have been a few of these already, most notably Zombies Run! and, unless you're ensconced in a long audiobook, they do add a bit of aural pleasure to the long slog of keeping you out of an early grave. There are a number of genres, including “Fantasy,” “Adventure” and “Travel.” Runtastic also announced the Libra scale, a BMI, bone mass, muscle mass, and BMR/AMR calculating scale that connects to an iOS device to track your weight and important statistics. It costs 129 euro and will be available in November.

Filesharing App Airlike Is Bump Without The Clashing Of Fists

This is a pretty cool new iOS app from Russia's Displair, maker of the Minority Report-styled Multi-Touch “air” display. Similar to Google-acquired Bump, Airlike uses an iPhone's various sensors in combination with its own cloud-powered algorithms to let you share photos, videos and contacts with other iPhone users in close proximity, but with one key difference: There's no need to bump phones or fists. Instead, you flick content through the “air” from one phone to another. Shunning Bluetooth or WiFi for peer-to-peer networking, the app uses a combination of GPS, and each phone's gyroscope, compass and accelerometer sensors, and relays that information to its own servers to know when two phones are pointing at each other. You then each confirm a connection and can begin flicking content from phone-to-phone - an experience the company describes in Arthur C. Clarke fashion as “absolutely magic”. And in our quick testing, the iPhone app works as advertised. Along with trumping Bump's need for physical contact, Displair is also talking up Airlike's functionality over Apple's own AirDrop phone-to-phone filesharing offering. That's because AirDrop requires iOS7, whilst Airlike works on iOS 6 and upwards, meaning that it supports a greater number of Apple's older devices. In addition, and crucially longterm, Displair plans to release Android and Windows Phone versions of the app, making Airlike, just like Bump before it, truly cross-platform. One thing lacking for now, however, is an Airlike API that other developers can tap into, though I'm told that this is on the roadmap and could be one way the company hopes to monetize the technology. Interestingly, the ability to transfer money between contacts peer-to-peer is also currently in development, thus taking another page from the Bump playbook. Meanwhile, the longer term business model revolves around the way Airlike will tie into the Russian startup's Displair Digital Signage product to enables users to grab content from advertising displays. So, for example, you could walk into a mall, see interesting ad-related content on Displair (or even a standard LCD screen) and have it sent to your smartphone using a simple gesture, much in the same way as the Airlike app works for phone-to-phone content sharing.

6Wunderkinder, Maker Of To-Do App Wunderlist, Has Raised A $30M Series B, In Sequoia's First Step Into Germany

Wunderlist, a popular task management app from Berlin-based 6Wunderkinder, has built up a loyal following of some six million users, with about one-third of them in the U.S. and nearly 241 million “to-do”s logged to date. Now TechCrunch understands that the startup is closing in on a round of investment that could help it ramp up even more. 6Wunderkinder has raised a Series B round of around $30 million, which it plans to use in part to open up an office in the U.S. The round sees Sequoia Capital come on as a new investor alongside existing backers Earlybird and Atomico. It's Sequoia's first investment in Germany. While term sheets have been signed, there are still some formal German clearances that need to be finalized before the company goes public with the news, we've heard. One source pegs the company at a $60-65 million valuation; another disputes that. If the $30 million funding number is accurate, that may have been pre-money. Prior to this, 6Wunderkinder had raised some $4.86 million in publicly disclosed funding. In addition to Earlybird and Atomico, that also includes T-Ventures, the investment arm of Deutsche Telekom, participating in a seed round of an undisclosed amount. Wunderlist said in September that it had passed 5.3 million users, but we have heard that the number is over 6 million now. More importantly, the company has been seeing a strong rise in engagement on the app, specifically for its team-focused, paid Pro product introduced in April of this year, and enhanced since then with features such as comments to encourage more collaboration. It was apparently the growing conversion and loyalty from existing users that was behind the investor enthusiasm. Sequoia, we have heard, took all of a week to meet with and then decide to invest in the company - in September, perhaps? While this investment may be Sequoia's first in Germany, the company - with newly knighted Welshman Sir Michael Moritz as chairman - is not exactly a stranger to Europe. Others include Songkick in the UK, Skyscanner in Scotland, and Klarna in Sweden. When you consider how many task management and productivity apps are on the market today, it's a testament to 6Wunderkinder that it has managed to make one that is so easy to use, and so well used. It's also a strong reminder of just how easy it is to make apps that appear similar to others, but it is far more difficult to make just one that works just as it should - that attention to making a perfect product has sometimes kept Wunderlist from getting tons of upgrades in short succession. Wunderlist sits alongside and complements other mobile-centered productivity/organization apps like Dropbox and Evernote - coincidentally also Sequoia portfolio companies. If Dropbox is where you store large files, and Evernote is where you log notes about what you are doing during the day, then Wunderlist is where you can track and remind yourself of when you are supposed to get there, and other things that you have to do. I'd wager that over time we'll see Wunderlist add even more dynamic functionality to that central premise, focusing specifically on premium features to drive more conversion on its paid products. We at TechCrunch have just returned from a week in Berlin for our first Disrupt event in Europe (it was fun). Speaking to startups based in the city, one theme I heard more than once was that Berlin is great for hatching ideas and bootstrapping (relatively cheap to live there compared to somewhere like London; a vibrant community of creative people). But, the thinking goes, when you are serious about scaling, then you need to look West, specifically to the U.S. This seems to be what Wunderlist has been doing and what it will be doing more of in the future. The U.S. has long been a focus for the German startup, both in terms of marketing itself to new users, and even in its office culture, with English the lingua franca at the HQ. 6Wunderkinder has had a good run with Wunderlist so far, but not everything has run as smoothly. 6Wunderkinder last year shut down Wunderkit, a project management app it had built and was still in beta, because it wasn't scaling fast enough - especially in comparison to Wunderlist. Going forward, 6Wunderkinder's CEO and co-founder Christian Reber will be spending significantly more time over there building a business development team in a new office in Silicon Valley. The product and technical folks, meanwhile, will remain based in Berlin. Even in Germany, though, there will be a strong U.S. influence, by way of Chad Fowler, joined as CTO from LivingSocial in February of this year and will be running the team there.

Groupon Redesigns Web And Mobile Apps To Focus On Personalization, Local And Search

Groupon hasn't had a great go of things since becoming a publicly traded company; founder and CEO Andrew Mason was ejected earlier this year, and its so-called “third-party” or daily deal revenue seems to be in a state of continuing decline as more customers shy away from or ignore those emails offering flash sales. But under current CEO Eric Lefkofsky, the focus has shifted to a place where users go to search for deals, which is why the redesigns of its mobile and web presences announced today make a lot of sense. On mobile, Groupon now has a “Local Explorer” feature, which automatically bubbles up content in the city in which a user is currently located (it used to serve this via a ‘Nearby' tag only). It detects location changes in the background and sends targeted deals via push notifications, too, which is clearly designed to remind users that the app exists when they're on holiday and perhaps more likely to be in need of discounted meals at restaurants, etc. There's now a search bar at the top of every screen on mobile, emphasizing that new focus under Lefkofsky, and users are also greeted with personalized deal collections unique to each when they launch the app, instead of just a generic layout based on their hometown location. Groupon also moves into 12 new markets on the iPad with this update, which is key if the company is targeting travelers. On the web, there's likewise a personalized homepage with “curated collections of deals based on the customer's interests, previous purchases, [and] purchases by other customers with similar interests,” and there's a new persistent search bar on every page of the site, which also features autocomplete suggestions. Those, too are designed to increase discoverability. Also new on the web are results that cross all of Groupon's lines of business, spanning local deals, travel, restaurants and more, which is clearly aimed at generating some generative cross-market sales from users who are looking for more than one thing at once. Search also gets new filters that are designed to help users pinpoint their own specific areas of interest much more clearly. Groupon may not be doing as well as some would've anticipated five years ago on its birthday, but these redesigns are the surest recent sign that it's turning the prow of what has become a rather large and lumbering ecommerce ship towards new waters. A lot of these changes seem obvious in light of the current trends among online businesses and startups, but that doesn't mean they can't still have significant impact on Groupon's average level of user engagement. Sadly, Groupon still requires an email to sign up for its website, which is perhaps the single most annoying thing about its platform. Baby steps, I suppose.

iFixit's iPad Air Teardown Reveals Tightly Packed Innards Dominated By A Big Battery

Apple's iPad Air goes on sale today – it's easily the best iPad Apple's put out so far, but we're waiting with bated breath for the iPad mini with Retina display. Until then, however, the Air is also the most remarkable feat of engineering in any tablet device in terms of what goes on under the hood, or at least that's what it looks like based on iFixit's traditional day one teardown of the brand new device. As it does with every new Apple product release, iFixit has managed to get its hands on one of the first shipping units available anywhere in the world, and they've immediately broken it open to see what makes it tick. In short, what makes it tick is a battery. It's a huge one, and it takes up most of the space within the case – but it's also actually still smaller than the battery of the iPad 4th generation, despite the fact that it's a much more powerful machine. This battery has only two cells, and is rated at 32.9 WHr capacity, while the last iPad held a three cell, 43 WHr unit. The new slimmed down lithium ion power source is supplying energy to the same screen as on the iPad it replaces, which is a 9.7-inch display. That means the increased battery efficiency is coming from somewhere else; it also probably means decreased component costs for Apple. Other highlights from the teardown include a look at the A7 chip (which is actually a slightly different version to the one in the iPhone 5s), confirmation that it does have 1GB of RAM, and the RF components that include a Qualcomm LTE processor with 1GB of dedicated RAM itself, which helps account for the iPad Air's magical range of LTE band connectivity. iFixit concludes by saying that the iPad Air achieves a repairability score of just 2 out of 10, which is in line with the repairability score of Apple tablets in general. If you're looking for something modular, however, you're probably not looking for an extremely thin and light tablet that's as portable as possible while still boasting impressive display and battery life. I'd never pop the case on one of these myself, but it's definitely fun to take a peek inside courtesy of someone who's brave enough to attempt it.

Google's Barge Likely A Modular, Floating Retail Space To Feature Glass

Google caught some attention this past week for mooring a huge barge in SF Bay for mysterious purposes. Rumors have been flying about what that barge could be used for, with some suggesting it's a floating data center, which Google does indeed have a patent for. But reports from a Bay Area local CBS affiliate and CNET suggest it's a retail play, and now CBS is reporting (via 9to5Google) that as confirmed from multiple sources. According to our sources the various reports about the barges being showcases for Google's Glass retail efforts are correct. The sources we spoke to were still uncertain about the exact uses that all of the barges would be put to in the end, but aiding Google in showcasing Glass for its eventual retail run is the likeliest fate of the units docked behind San Francisco's Treasure Island. The CBS story outlined a luxury showroom with a ‘party deck' up top and spaces below for retail stores that could showcase Glass and other Google products. This report was said to be ‘pretty accurate' by our sources. CBS affiliate KPIX 5 says that the barge will eventually include luxury showrooms for gadgets such as Google Glass, as well as a party deck, and provide hands-on experiences to select potential clients by invitation only. It's the brainchild of Google X, the skunkworks at Google designed to build some of that company's more experimental products and services, including Google Glass and self-driving cars, and it's overseen by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Brin is reportedly the driving force behind this retail barge experiment, and the purpose of the plan is to compete with Apple's dominating retail presence, according to the CBS report. While the barge doesn't look like a luxury showroom at the moment, it's built out of modular 40-foot shipping containers and is designed to be quickly torn down and put back together easily. It's not a strictly seaborne affair, either – Google could reportedly assemble it on trucks or on freight trains, too, adding new meaning to the term “road show.” CBS says that the barge's launch has been delayed because of how it's been designated by the U.S. Coast Guard, which is so far complying with Google's apparent request that its purpose be kept secret. Earlier this year, reports surfaced that suggested Google would begin opening its own retail stores in time for this year's holiday season. A splashy launch of a naval retail outlet aimed at high-value clientele would definitely be an interesting way to kick-off wider retail efforts, and this will help Google do more to evangelize established lines of business like Chrome OS and Nexus devices, as well as more experimental projects like Google Glass, which will need plenty more consumer exposure if it ever hopes to be a more broadly appealing device.