Hello, bezel.

Google is set to kick off it’s yearly developer’s conference in less than 30 minutes. Big things are expected including the announcement of Google’s long-rumored Nexus tablet. Well, here it is. The Google Play Store inadvertently leaked the Nexus 7 early.

Right now all we have is the image above but it’s very telling. Apparently Google changed up the tablet OS. The pic above shows a user interface that’s similar to that of a smartphone. The menu bar of ICS is out and a row of icons are in its place. Then, embedded within the massive bezel is a front facing camera, a feature solely missing from the Kindle Fire.

You can make the image appear if you jump over to the device section on the Google Play store, open the banner image in a new tab and change the url to say “nexus_7_banner_001.png” rather than “galaxy_nexus_banner_005.png”.

Of course right now several key details are missing including the price, release date and information concerning the new interface. All should be revealed within an hour or two, though.

Mobile shopping app shopkick is announcing a partnership with MasterCard today which will allow cardholders to earn “kicks” (shopkicks’ in-app rewards) by linking their card with shopkick’s Buy & Collect program and making qualifying purchases. These kicks can later be redeemed for things like gift cards, music downloads, movie tickets, and other offers.

In addition, in exchange for signing up for the new program, MasterCard cardholders will also receive 250 bonus points for each card they add to shopkick for a limited time during the program’s launch.

For background, Shopkick’s free mobile app for iPhone or Android rewards consumers for walking into the store, as opposed to a more manual “check in” as with Foursquare. Instead, the app uses proprietary technology which involves in-store hardware that can detect a inaudible signal emitted from the shopper’s mobile phone. Shoppers are also rewarded for other actions, like scanning barcodes or trying on clothes, for example. Shopkick’s retail partners include big names like Target, Best Buy, Macy's, Crate & Barrel, Old Navy, American Eagle, Sports Authority, Toys “R” Us, Simon Malls and others, as well as 40 brands (P&G, Unilever, Kraft, Colgate, Clorox, Disney, HP, Intel).

Earlier this year, the company reported over 3 million active users, 5 million walk-ins, 12 million product scans, 1 billion in-app offer views, and more than $110 million in in-store revenue for partner retailers and brands in 2011.

With the new partnership between shopkick and MasterCard, the goal is to cut down on the popular “showrooming” trend. Birthed by the growth of smartphones and mobile Internet access, “showrooming” sees shoppers treating brick-and-mortar stores as showrooms where they can see, touch and test retail merchandise in real life before proceeding to order it online for a discounted price from Internet retailers like Amazon. Shoppers who link their cards to shopkick will be incentivized to buy in-store instead, with offers like “spend $40 and receive 250 kicks” at retailers including American Eagle Outfitters, Arden B., Crate and Barrel, Old Navy, Toys"R"Us and Wet Seal.

The announcement comes at a time when MasterCard is moving steadily into various m-commerce initiatives, which includes things like its newly announced digital wallet plans via PayPass Wallet Services, for example. The company also announced a deals service of its own back in April, but instead of rewarding consumers for shopping in-store, the program was more of a response to Groupon and Living Social in that it was focused on geo-targeted local offers.

Skillpages is ‘one place on the web’ to find skilled people. The idea is that you find people who can do jobs for you that you share a mutual friend with, or perhaps worked at the same company or went to the same school. It brings much more social validation to hiring people. And they are getting significant traction. We spoke to founder Iain MacDonald during the F.ounders conference at the Nasdaq in New York.

Does the world really need another visual bookmarking service? After all, we already have Pinterest and all of its clones. Clipix, however, believes that it has found a way to differentiate itself from the competition. The service, which is coming out of beta today, feels a bit like a hybrid between Evernote and Pinterest, with a bit of Pearltrees thrown in for good measure. It is a visual bookmarking tool that allows you to save bookmarks (or “clips, as Clipix likes to call them) in well-organized public and private folders. You can, however, also upload your own photos, office documents and PDF files to the service as well.

This mix, as Clipix founder and Wall Street veteran Oded Berkowitz told me earlier this week, is meant to keep the service flexible and allow users to, for example, easily create a folder for all the research they are doing about a purchase, as well as a copy of the warranty after the purchase. His aim is to make Clipix a service that’s what he calls a “Pinterest for the real world” and not just a visual bookmarking tool for content that’s highly visual (and quickly forgotten).

Overall, the service, which has been in beta since February, feels very feature-complete already. The are advanced sharing features that let users collaborate in real time. Folders can be nested within folders and users can easily make their folders either private or public (according to Clipix, 70% of the folders on the service right now are private). The service is available in 12 languages and offers native Android and iOS apps, too.

Beyond Static Bookmarks: Price Drop Alerts

One nifty tool that sets Clipix apart from the competition is its price drop alert tool (the company has a patent pending for this technology). Clipix automatically notices when you save a bookmark from a shopping site and then lets you set up alerts when a price drops by a certain percentage or below a certain price. The service’s mobile apps, by the way, tie in nicely with this feature, as they also allow you to scan barcodes. As Berkowitz noted, this feature doesn’t just work for shopping sites either, but also for real estate sites, for example.

If all of this is enough to really challenge Pinterest and its clones remains to be seen, but Clipix says that it currently hosts about 1 million “clips” already.

The company has received funding from its founder, as well as a number of other angel investors from the New York area and is headquartered in Fort Lee, New Jersey. For the time being, Berkowitz told me, the company isn’t focused too much on developing a revenue stream, but given its price drop alert feature, affiliate links are an obvious avenue for the company to pursue.

Rafter, a new edtech company formed from the rebranding of popular textbook rental service (and Chegg competitor) BookRenter, announced its first-ever strategic acquisition this morning. The lucky acquiree? HubEdu: A young, San Diego-based startup that provides universities with a suite of analytics, tracking and price comparison tools to help them increase their revenue and make course materials (and higher education as a whole) more affordable for students.

For those unfamiliar, the newly-formed Rafter offers a cloud-based platform that enables schools and administrators to improve the affordability, effectiveness, and accessibility of course material. Through BookRenter, Rafter lays claim to a network that spans across 500+ campuses and serves millions of students nationwide. Though it’s less than four months from launch, HubEdu’s exit to Rafter gives it access to a much larger audience than it would have been able to reach on its own. Plus, being still in the early stages, the acquisition affords its technology the opportunity to evolve at scale from the get-go.

In turn, as Rafter has turned from BookRenter’s singular focus on textbooks to providing a broader, cloud-based platform that helps students reduce the supplementary costs of education, HubEdu’s comparison tools (that will show how textbooks at the campus store price relative to those on Amazon, for example) give schools the chance to win the battle for price, selection and service for their students.

The hope is that, by giving students better service and more competitive prices on course materials, schools can continue to reverse the decade-long trend of declining market share and lure students away from those pesky online merchants and predatory distributors that have been steadily eating away at their profit margins.

As for some quick context: Founded in 2006, BookRenter was one of the first online textbook rental services for college students. Since then, the startup has gone on to parter with over 500 campuses, reaching more than 6 million students nationwide, and has raised over $56 million in venture funding along the way.

While the platform continues to grow, BookRenter ran into some formidable competition in the textbook rental space, mainly in the form of Chegg, which is itself one of the most well-funded companies in education. (Nearly $200 million.) This, along with identifying a much bigger market opportunity led to BookRenter rebranding as Rafter in February, and consequently broadening its scope from textbooks to course materials of all shapes and sizes.

Since then, Rafter has been selling its cloud-based platform to teachers and administrators in the hopes of providing them with a better way to manage and control course materials — at every level, from discovery and adoption to pricing, both for physical and digital content. The big picture idea was to help solve the difficulties schools and teachers have in sourcing course material — a process which can be more than a little complicated — and archaic.

Naturally, for most teachers, discovering new course content traditionally happens by word of mouth, for example. Not to mention the difficulties schools and teachers find in gaining access to the rights of course materials and ensuring fulfillment, etc.

Rafter is on a mission to bring all of these old school processes online, while partnering with universities to manage discovery, supply and distribution of textbooks, education software, and everything in between.

Meanwhile, the San Diego-based HubEdu had been following a similar trajectory. The startup itself was born out of a site called SwoopThat.com, which was initially a platform that allowed consumers to buy course books. Realizing they were just scratching the surface, the founders came to the decision that if they really wanted to make any significant imprint, HubEdu would have to pursue a more holistic approach.

They turned their attention to helping schools transform their campus stores into the heart of the whole retail ecosystem. By putting stores at the center of all purchases on campus, whether online or off, HubEdu believed that schools could begin to see incremental increase in revenue. So, they developed a price comparison tool that could be integrated into student purchasing, ensuring that schools would be able to capture, monetize, and understand all the transactions taking place on campus.

For students, course materials end up being the second highest expense behind tuition. By offering schools access to inventory analytics, tracking systems, as well as insight into purchasing behavior, they can begin to act more like retail or eCommerce companies and, as a result, are able to begin reducing costs. Which, after all, is really all that a cash-strapped college student wants. Well, that and a competent guidance counselor.

Rafter CEO Mehdi Magsoodnia tells us that he sees the acquisition in the context of a promising trend that’s emerged in education of late. Namely, that there’s been a steady rise in the number of edtech startups raising venture capital. And he’s far from being alone in noticing — the VC community invested over $400 million in edtech companies in 2011. That may not seem mind-blowing by itself, but considering venture capital investment in education was under $100 million as recently as 2007, one starts to get a sense of how big this up-tick is (and will likely continue to be).

However, as the Rafter CEO points out, many of these VC-backed startups are now beginning to look for exits with larger players that can help bring them distribution and generate demand for their products. Of course, typically that’s been limited to the big, old-school players like Pearson and Blackboard.

With $50M+ under its belt and the promise of facing a much larger market, Rafter is definitely looking to represent the new, cloud-based version of the Pearsons and Blackboards of the world. That’s probably giving it a little too much credit, but it is true that major tech markets tend not to thrive without a healthy number of resident, large companies that can provide the little guys with profitable exits.

As far as that goes, Rafter’s acquisition of HubEdu is a clear (first) step in this direction, and it would be very surprising if we didn’t see the company make at least a few more acquisitions over the next year. Stay tuned.

For more, find Rafter here. HubEdu here.

Well, it appears to be mobile payments day here at TechCrunch. When it rains, it pours, right? Another announcement hitting the wires today comes from global mobile payments startup Kuapay, which has just closed a $4 million round of funding from a single, private investor. The company was started in January 2011 by Joaquin Ayuso de Paul, best known as a co-founder of Tuenti, a company often referred to as the “Spanish Facebook,” which later sold to Telefonica for $100 million.

With Kuapay, the idea isn’t just to create another e-wallet application, but to make using the wallet app a more social and engaging experience, while also integrating customer loyalty programs for merchants.

Kuapay’s wallet app, available for iPhone, Android, BlackBerry and soon, Windows Phone, allows you to store your bank cards, your store cards/rewards cards, and eventually will support any sort of money-storing account, says Joaquin. You can then use the wallet anywhere Kuapay is accepted. In the U.S., its current reach is small. Since the company is based in Santa Monica, California, Kuapay’s first customers are local merchants. There are 40 in total at present, but the company has just signed a deal which will see a southern California KFC franchise piloting the service at 100 locations.

However, outside the U.S., the 35-person company has offices in Chile and Spain, and has been running technical trials there, as well as in Panama, Columbia, and the U.K., with Hong Kong on the way. With the new funding, which comes from a private investor in Chilean technology (but never in tech startups until now), the company is planning to open offices in N.Y., Madrid, and Hong Kong, and will begin to move from technical to commercial trials in worldwide markets, also targeting Brazil, Canada, and eventually, China.

To use the wallet, customers launch a PIN-protected app, which then displays a QR code for the card they want to use. This is then scanned at point-of-sale, but it doesn’t actually transmit the full credit card information during the scan, for security purposes. The company is integrating its technology with some of NCR’s point-of-sale systems, as well as Micros, Aloha’s restaurant point-of-sale, and various others. For POS systems where QR codes don’t work, a one-dimensional barcode is also available. And for even older systems, merchants can choose to use a Kuapay-provided iPod Touch for scanning barcodes or they can enter in a 13-digit number into their POS instead.

In addition to the e-wallet functionality, Kuapay also offers a “gamified,” social wallet experience and associated customer loyalty programs. Merchants can offer punchcard-type programs through Kuapay, as well as send out coupons and offers through the platform. The clever thing here is that the coupons, offers, punchcards punches, and payment info can all be transmitted during the barcode scanning process. Users earn badges from their purchases or by scanning a friend’s barcode, and these badges can be translated into free dollars to be spent in the store, or can be tweeted or shared to Facebook. However, unlike some experiments in the past, these updates don’t detail how much you’ve paid.

Prior to today’s funding, the company had raised $2.5 million from private investors and friends and family.

A number of companies have tried to crack the problem of having an app at a business conference which allows you to connect to the people around you, see the agenda and make business connections. So it’s encouraging to see the official launch today of Bizzabo on the iPhone and Android, but which – crucially – provides a self-service web interface for event organizers. It’s that last part that’s key here. We’ve seen CrowdVine and Presdo (both of which I hate with gusto BTW) do this for events, but after being demo’d Bizzabo I can confidently say it’s one of the best conference apps I’ve seen, and I’ve seen a few, because it makes that link between the event organizer and the people around you.

I think Bizzabo’s closest contender might be Oleapark who will now be watching this Bizzabo with interest as will Shpare. Among other contenders there is Schmooze, which is is pretty good but still needs more conference integration.

Eventasaur.us is a great web app but guys, where is the mobile app? And Yasmolive went into more of a service business alas. If you’re in Russia you might be using Omyconf. Then there’s the clever Lanyrd, but it doesn’t do the location-based networking thing.

Meanwhile mostly people at events have been using apps built for more general location-based networking like Highlig.ht, Sonar and Ban.jo, or ones built with LinkedIN in mind like Intro. Not ideal.

But still, I’ve not seen an app that is really deeply integrated with a conference I go to, outside of apps built bespoke, such as the Le Web app from Mobile Roadie. And who wants to download a brand new app for every conference they go to? Not me.

First up, the entire Bizzabo service is free because they want to built traction first. An event organiser from anywhere in the world can add an event and create a mobile social network for their attendees. It’s been trialled a lot in Israel where it’s become quite common and is the official app for the MLOVE conference in Berlin this week.

The app cross references your LinkedIn profile with other event attendees and identifies who will be the most beneficial contact for you. Attendees can message each other inside the app and it keeps a database of people you met at each event – very handy. Plus you know when you got a LinkedIn invite from within the app, so you can put faces to names from the event you just went to. It may even revitalise my use of LinkedIn, which I barely visit these days.

Conference attendees can network on the app before the event but then check into the physical location of the conference. That way you can tell who actually made it or not. Event organisers can set a private code for people to use the app to prevent others from ‘virtually’ attending. If the code gets shared to people not at the event, then you just look at who has physically checked-in to sort the wheat from the chaff.

Event organizers can enter the agenda and speaker profiles of their event. Crucially, organizer can change the event timing and content and send push notifications to attendees. This could be a god-send for event organisers that just know the event will run over-time. In fact, it’s a killer feature.

But there’s more.

An “Offers” feature (available in the iPhone version) allows exhibitors or sponsors to create Groupon type offers and generate business leads. This sounds to me like their potential business model. They could do rev-shares on this basis once they have scale. And in theory sponsors could send messages only to CEOs or to target groups. Quite powerful.

Plus, event analytics and polling features will be released in the near future. There go all those dumb feedback forms – real data is what events organisers need.

Founded in 2011 by Eran Ben Shushan, Alon Alroy and Boaz Katz, Bizzabo is seed funded by angel investors and Jeff Pulver, the serial entrepreneur and founder of ’140 Conf’ event series.

Email. Everybody hates it but no tech company has figured out how to replace its old post-office metaphor with something more intuitive for the modern world. But Asana, the high-profile task management company started by early Facebookers, is taking a shot at this goal with a new feature called Inbox.

This isn’t a direct competitor to email, though, as cofounder Justin Rosenstein related to me during a demo earlier this week.

Instead, as he described it, the company is combining the most useful parts of email, plus activity feeds, notifications and other types of messaging systems that you’ll see on sites like Facebook and Twitter. The result is a central column of new information flowing through, showing you all the activity happening with you and your colleagues in Asana.

So, if you’re a part of a project in Asana — say “Guest Posts” that an editorial staff is editing for the coming weekend (a real use case) — you can click on the Inbox button at the top of the right-hand navigation column in the site to track all of the latest activity from others in the group. You’ll see “stories” sort of like in the Facebook news feed, but each story is about a task, and describes an action. So if Peter Ha marked a task you assigned him as complete, you’ll know that he’s finished editing a guest post. Rosenstein adds that other activity will appear, like if someone creates a task that you do not follow within a project, you’ll see only one notification about it.

Each Task story lets you flag it as important or unfollow in the event your colleagues are getting too spammy. And, you only see updates on tasks and projects that you’re subscribed to. Real-time updates show up as other users make changes, and each story gets archived automatically as you read through so you’re automatically resetting to zero by using it.

Compare this to how email might work. I send Peter a doc to edit, which he moves into Google Docs and edits separately. He emails back saying that he’s working on it. Then he has to email back to confirm. And if we get into an argument about how to edit it or whatnot, then that’ll just drag the thread out further.

Now look back at Asana. Each task already contains all the metadata about the article we’re working, including any notes we (or that other guy Anthony) leave for each other about it. The discussion, the scheduled run-date, the person responsible and everything else is there instead of in email or in a spreadsheet somewhere — and this new Inbox feed means we only need to click once then browse to see the latest news.

The main problem with the new feature is that most of the value is in cutting down internal communication email. That’s been great for the growing number of companies using it, including Foursquare, Twitter and AirBnB.

I told Rosenstein that as useful as Asana was for our guest post system, we’re too loose of an organization to need this sort of internal tool for most stories. Our writers, after all, have great freedom to publish as they please without going through a task-driven review process. What we could really use, I explained, was an easier way to import any email from our inboxes into an Asana task; its current system requires a bunch of copy-pasting special Asana codes into your email adress books then remembering to cc any outbound email to them, which is a pain. He replied they’ve gotten many requests in this area from all sorts of other organizations with lots of external email communication (customer service organizations being a good example, heh). And he promised that there’s a plan on the roadmap for something along these lines.

Read the official details of the Inbox launch from my old VentureBeat colleague Dan Kaplan, who now works for Asana. 

As companies from small startups to large enterprise continue to generate an ever-increasing amount of data, the demand for affordable and scalable databases also increases. Typically, this market has been the domain of large vendors like Oracle, but besides them and the usual open-source players, we’ve also seen a growing number of closed-source startups enter this space. Citus Data, which is launching version 1.0 of its CitusDB today, is the latest startup to challenge these incumbents.

The Y Combinator graduate (the company was part of the summer 2011 class) develops a scalable analytics database that’s built on top of PostgreSQL. Unlike its direct competitors, the company makes its product available for free for users who only need up to eight nodes. It’s also, as the company notes, “the first such database that’s available for download.”

The company, which has received a total of $1.6 million in seed funding, is based in Silicon Valley, with an additional office in Istanbul, Turkey. Among the seed investors are Trinity Ventures, Digital Garage, Matt Ocko, Ben Ling and Paul Buchheit. The founders are industry veterans who previously worked at Amazon and other companies that had to deal with large amounts of data since the early days of the web. The team has been working on the product for about two years now and already has a number of customers who are using CitusDB in a production environment.

As the founders told me earlier this week, building a database than can both execute SQL queries and still scale well across machines (including in the cloud) is a hard technical problem. CitusDB often outperforms legacy databases and, the founders note, as well as Hadoop in combination with the data warehouse system Hive. Its product, CitusDB says, offers both scalability (the company promises that “you can linearly scale out to hundreds of nodes), as well as replication and high availability.

You can find a few more examples of typical use cases (including a few datasets to test on your own servers) for CitusDB here.

Google I/O is nearly upon us, and all signs point to Google revealing a tablet later today. The device leaked and then over the last few hours several high-level sources confirmed the device’s existence. It’s likely a low-end, 7-inch tablet powered by Google’s latest mobile operating system, Jelly Bean.

Try as they might, Google has yet to deliver an answer to the iPad. Most Honeycomb and Ice Cream Sandwich tablets were flops, and it’s devices like the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet that have managed to make an impact though they hide their Android underpinnings beneath custom user interfaces. Apple is dominating in the tablet wars and with Microsoft officially throwing down with the high-priced Surface, the Google Nexus Tablet must be a success.

Killer Display

The Google Nexus Tablet needs a halo spec. It needs something out of the norm to champion its cause. It needs a killer display.

Apple raised the bar with the new iPad and its retina display. It’s unlikely that Google will use a super-high resolution display in the Nexus Tablet, but it needs a display better than something like the Kindle Fire. The Nexus Tablet’s display just has to be the best at its low price point, and that shouldn’t be that hard. Early leaks place a 1280 x 800 IPS display inside the Nexus Tablet — that’s significantly better than the 1024 x 600 Fire’s screen.

Something Special

Amazon launched the Kindle Fire right. Hopefully Google was paying attention. The Fire looks different and has several features exclusive to the device.

The Kindle Fire received a lot of traction at launch thanks to its Silk Browser. This browser promised faster web load times by routing the traffic through an Amazon server which compressed the data and delivered it to the tablet. Never mind that the Silk Browser doesn’t work that well, the feature sounded awesome at launch and gave Amazon a lot to brag about. Google needs something to brag about.

3rd Party Content Integration

Google content services suck. Rather than using Google Books and Play Movies, Google would be smart to utilize successful 3rd party apps to serve up the content. This crazy theory would put Amazon and Netflix as the main providers of books, movies, and music. In a sense this would kill the so-called pure Android experience usually associated with Nexus devices, but it would also make the device a lot more tempting to the average consumer. This move might also steal some Kindle Fire owners board with their devices but not willing to buy a more expensive device.

Expandable Storage

If the rumors hold true, the Google Nexus Tablet has a relatively small amount of onboard storage. But that’s fine for most people — as long as they can stick a microSD card into the thing.

The iPad’s lack of removable storage is still a sour spot among even its most fervent supporters. A simply memory card slot increases the amount of use cases while making it easier for owners to add and remove items from the device. For better or worse, Apple tends to route data to an iDevice through iTunes. But Google wisely doesn’t rely on desktop software for its devices.

Competitive Pricing

All the rumors state that the Google Nexus Tablet will likely be priced competitively with the Kindle Fire and Nook Tablet. Expect a price tag between $199 and $249.

The correct price will make or break the Nexus Tablet. Samsung, Motorola, and all the rest have yet to break the iPad’s hold on the $500 price point. Google would not be successful either at that level either, but the Kindle Fire has lost a good amount of its hype lately. Google might be able to sneak in and grab the number two spot from Amazon — the right price is crucial.

An Immediate Launch

The Google Nexus Tablet needs to launch sooner rather than later. Microsoft made a potentially grave mistake announcing the Surface tablet months prior to its release.

That said, Google has a history of sending I/O attendees home with its latest devices. Over the past few years Google handed developers smartphones, tablets, and hotspots. It wouldn’t be surprising to see that Google hid a few Nexus Tablets under the seats this year.

Fitness tracking service Endomondo first launched back in 2008, and it seems they haven’t stopped picking up steam since then.

The team has just announced on the company’s official blog that their service now plays home to 10 million registered users — not too shabby, especially considering that roughly three million of them have signed up for the service since the beginning of 2012.

If you’re still unacquainted with Endomondo, think of it as part personal trainer app and part fitness-focused Facebook. A crucial part of that experience is loading up and using one of Endomondo’s myriad mobile versions (the app is available on iOS, Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, and all those other also-ran mobile platforms) to track workouts, which can then be shared with a community of like-minded fitness buffs. Users can cheer each other on through comments, and also respond to challenges designed to keep everyone involved pushing themselves to their limits.

Endomondo co-founder Mette Lykke pegs the service’s continued growth (according to her, the service picks up about 20,000 new users daily) on the strength of its social component. “Most of our users find it motivating to connect with friends, family and co-workers around fitness,” she said. “The fact that our service becomes more motivating with the more friends you've got is a key driver for Endomondo's growth rate.”

To help celebrate their new milestone, Endomondo has compiled and released some new statistics about how people use their service — for example, Endomondo tracks 250,000 user workouts everyday, with running claiming the crown as the most popular type of exercise tracked. Given the company’s international roots (it was founded out of Denmark), it may come as little surprise that a full 75% of the service’s users live outside of the United States. Interestingly enough, they seem to have been helped along by another social force — Endomondo says that their traffic has increased 150% since Facebook launched their love-it-or-hate-it Timeline design, thanks in part to the fact that nearly 50,000 Endomondo workouts are shared there.

Today, mobile payments startup Square is rolling out what the company says is the most heavily-requested feature by its merchants to date: user permissions. What this means is that business owners will now be able to enable their staff to use Square devices to accept payments without having to provide those employees with access to the same sensitive information that a business owner may see on their end.

Until now, owners who wanted to set up their employees to also accept Square payments on the business’s behalf would actually have to hand over their username and password – yes, the same username and password that allows them to login and see the the details of their business’s account, all the transactions, and even their banking information. Um, yikes.

While there have been no reported incidents of Square employees using this admin-level access for ill, it’s the sort of preventative security feature that larger companies need in order to feel comfortable with adopting the system. It’s also likely a change reflective of Square’s growing customer base. The company is now processing $6 billion in annual payments it recently said, alongside the announcement of its new CFO Sarah Friar, formerly of Salesforce.com. Many businesses using Square are no longer seeing it as an experimental tool they’re “trying out,” but rather it’s becoming a part of their everyday workflow. And that requires more attention to big business type concerns. Like security.

It’s also interesting to compare Square’s moves with that of rival Intuit GoPayment in this case. When GoPayment debuted in May 2009, it had the ability for admins to add multiple users to their GoPayment accounts, permissions intact, right out of the box. The decision was made because the company’s initial target market was field employees – like electricians and contractors. Now Intuit is after the smaller businesses Square has been signing up, and, at the same time, Square is expanding beyond the smaller businesses who didn’t need the complexity of GoPayment in order to snag signups from larger operations now realizing the need for security.

The move comes only a week after Square announced the debut of its customer loyalty punchcard program - another move designed to turn Square from an occasional tool to an everyday one. The company couldn’t say whether or not the permissioning introduced today will become more granular in the future. That is to say, whether it would one day allow owners/admins to designate some employees with permission to manage the specials and offers in the loyalty program, for example, without giving the admin-level control. For now, Square users are either an admin or someone who can only accept payments. There’s no in between.

The company says it’s working on other things that will give business owners greater control over their Square experience, including improvements to the analytics on the back-end and reporting. Today’s update, however, will give the owners the ability to see who among their team sold what in their sales reports.

To enable the new security feature today, managers can go into their account's Business Settings and send invitations to their staff (up to 50 people), and employees can then set up their own Square login so they can accept payments on behalf of the business. All the payments will be deposited directly into the business’ bank account.

We’ve seen some notable developments around mobile payments that turn handsets effectively into credit cards, credit card processors, reward point aggregators, and more. A new product out today could see the ranks of these services swell even larger: mobile marketing company Placecast is launching ShopAlerts Wallet, an HTML5-based, white-label service combining local offers and payments, which it wants to sell on to credit card companies, carriers and retailers to develop their own mobile payment wallets and loyalty services.

PlaceCast says that this is service is the first of its kind, in that it ties location-based offers (the service Placecast is best known for) to mobile payments in a “turnkey”, plug-and-play solution. Based on HTML5, the service works across all smartphone platforms, and is potentially easier to implement and use than a native app: ”There's no app to build for marketers, and no app for consumers to download,” the company says.

This represents a change in focus for Placecast, which has up to now made its name around location-based offer services. These are also delivered in a white-label service, with clients including O2, the UK mobile operator, as well as the U.S. mall operator DDR. Earlier this month Placecast announced that this service had reached 10 million active users who have opted in to receive offers.

Although Placecast is not announcing any customers for its new mobile wallet service, it seems its existing customer base might good bet for who might be the first to roll out a service on the platform.

Those that already have native payment or loyalty apps in place can add more functionality using Placecast’s APIs; those coming new into payments can build web-based solutions grom the ground up, or re-skin the mobile wallet app created by Placecast itself.

Blair Swedeen, the SVP for strategy and business development at Placecast, says that there are several front and back-end features that come with using its new mobile wallet service: included is the ability to manage how you market the service to users through push notifications, as well as analytics reporting on how it is used. He notes that the wallet plugs into any payment processor — something that Placecast itself will not handle. Payments, however, are not totally seamless: they can be made at the point of sale if a device is NFC-enabled or if the app has been linked up with carrier biling. But if there is no NFC, or carrier billing enabled, then its back to swiping a credit card.

For consumers, the idea is to get to the point of making a mobile purchase from location-based discovery. You are near a good offer or product being pushed to you; and now you can go and buy it right away with the touch of a button. Placecast says that its wallet will be able to integrate with services that help manage gift cards, tickets and other non-physical items.

Such a service might sound a little familiar: aggregating redemptions for tickets, loyalty cards and other non-physical goods is what Apple is doing with its own Passbook service, with other platforms are also moving in the same direction. It remains to be seen whether a non-native approach like Placecast’s, which puts more power into the hands of carriers, brands and card companies will win out over those that may be more limited in platform applicability, but far more connected when it comes to smooth operation, app integration and, crucially, payment details for the handset users in question.

Revel Systems, an iPad point-of-sale company backed by $3.7 million in funding, is today introducing a new hardware product designed to take the place of an Ethernet router. The “Revel Router,” as the device is being called, is an Apple-certified “made for iPad” technology that allows shops to run their POS through an Apple iPad. The router connects other components in a retailer or restaurant’s POS setup, too, including coin dispensers, barcode scanners, scales, kitchen display systems, kitchen printers, receipt printers, and more. And the company is selling the device as a package deal including an iPad, the router, peripherals, and POS software.

More importantly, the system forgoes the need for an ISP-provided Internet connection in order to work – the whole thing can run off the iPad’s 3G or 4G.

The Revel Router works in conjunction with the company’s previously launched point-of-sale software, which is now being piloted by Popeye’s, Twistee Treat, Illy Coffee, Camille’s Sidewalk Café, among others. In total, around 300 locations have the system installed, the majority of which are in the U.S. Initially launched into beta around eight months ago, the POS software was recently updated to a more robust version (dubbed “Atlas”) which includes things like multiple location functionality, analytics, and support for offline mode.

Says Revel co-founder and CEO Lisa Falzone, “a restaurant owner or retail owner doesn’t even know when the Internet goes out,” she says.”This is the biggest problem in these establishments, and it’s our biggest support headache.” When the connection goes down, so does a business owner’s ability to check inventory, run credit cards and process sales, among other things. And many legacy POS systems don’t have offline functionality built in. The ability for operations to continue seamlessly – by failing over the to iPad’s 3G/4G – will be a huge selling point for their software, the company believes. And so will the fact that businesses can have a working POS setup from day one – before they have a chance to call the ISP to come out and install their Internet connection.

“It’s completely disruptive to the point-of-sale industry because it’s truly plug-and-play,” says Falzone. “You don’t need anyone to come in there and hook up your Internet connection, you don’t need to deal with your ISP, there’s no maintenance costs of I.T. people. All you have to do is pull out your printer, an iPad, a stand, and a cash drawer out of the box, and set it on the countertop.”

The way the system works involves proprietary hardware and a patent-pending wireless protocol. “The Revel Router has a port on it, and all these devices have a connector on them,” explains CTO Chris Ciabarra of the system’s setup, “and all the devices connect to this router and then wirelessly connect through our driver we created with Apple to the iPad.” He says the system isn’t really designed for mobility, but rather aims to replace the existing, stationary set-ups at the point-of-sale. However, you can connect additional displays once the base station is in place. For example, if you wanted to use an iPad as a display instead of a ticket printer back in the kitchen, that would be possible without the need for an additional router. The second display would just connect wirelessly with the main system.

The starting package is $3,330 and includes an iPad, cash box, printer, credit card swiper, the router, and the software license. Business owners can then add on other components as they choose. In addition, Revel offers two support packages – email and online ticketing support for $100/month or per terminal fee that’s available 24/7.

To be clear, Revel doesn’t consider itself to be a Square competitor, but is aiming directly at the enterprise market. “We go after the restaurants and retail shops that are producing over $300,000 annually and above,” says Falzone. “We don’t go after the street vendors, or people who buy couches on Craigslist.”

Before today’s launch of the router hardware, the company was adding around 50 locations per month, and all retail inquires have been inbound. They’re now hiring additional sales people, Falzone says. She also says that Revel is “very, very close to profitability,” and doesn’t need to raise any additional funding at this time.

[Insert distasteful joke here regarding Windows Phone 7 lack of upgrade path to WinPhone 8]

Athens saw daylight a little earlier than normal today. At approximately 4:45 AM local time, arsonists rammed a van laden with gas cans into the front of Microsoft’s Greek HQ and set it ablaze. According to a Reuters’ report, the security guards were held at gunpoint, but also away from the fire. No one was injured in the attack.

Videos and pictures show Microsoft’s HQ are still intact although heavily damaged. “Staff were told not to come to work today, and probably also tomorrow,”Lia Komninou, Microsoft spokeswoman, said on Skai TV today.

The police have not yet named suspects.

[Something something something people still sore over Windows Vista]

Solum, a startup building tools for a more data-driven approach to agriculture, has raised $17 million in Series B funding.

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, and partner John O’Farrell will be joining the Solum board. The company’s PR team sent me a copy of the blog post that O’Farrell has written about the funding, where he reveals that his team’s nickname for the startup was “Software Eats Dirt.” Solum isn’t just a software company, but I guess O’Farrell couldn’t resist echoing his partner Marc Andreessen’s famous editorial on “Why Software Is Eating The World“. (And as you can see from my headline, I couldn’t resist, either.) O’Farrell says Solum presents another opportunity for a Silicon Valley company to transform an industry:

“Solum's platform enables farmers to correlate nutrient measurements and fertilizer application to actual yields, in a constantly improving feedback loop. Over time, the result for farmers should be a ‘virtuous circle’ of increasing crop yields driven by ever-smarter and environmentally sustainable use of fertilizer, water and other precious resources. In essence, Solum's technology will provide the data to drive farmers' new intelligent machines, and the software to manage their application on a large scale.”

The company has announced two measurement tools so far. There’s a lab kit that customers can take into the field to measure the nitrate in the soil. Solum also runs a laboratory in Ames, Iowa, where customers can send soil samples for multinutrient analysis. The data from both services is accessible via the Web.

Solum previously raised a $2.05 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures, which also participated in the new round. The company’s three co-founders all received Ph.Ds in Applied Physical from Stanford.

As the premier spot online for listing and booking short-term housing accommodations, Airbnb has already seen huge growth since being founded in 2008. It announced just last week that it had hit 10 million guest nights booked in total, with 200,000 active property listings on the site.

But now that Airbnb has kind of reached critical mass, it wants to make discovering new spaces a little easier, a little more social, and a little more joyful for its users. To do that, it’s rolling out a brand new site design and a new iPhone app, both of which are designed to let users navigate lists of popular destinations, editorially curated content, and spaces that their friends like. It’s also introducing Wish Lists, enabling its visitors to create Pinterest-like collections of spaces to stay in.

Airbnb’s new Wish List feature takes the place of Favorites, which few users took advantage of, according to lead designer Shaun Modi. Even when users knew about Favorites, the feature was a little flimsy and rarely used. Wish Lists are designed to be a lot more robust, allowing users to “collect” or “curate” their favorite Airbnb destinations into themed groups.

Users who travels frequently to New York, for instance, could create a Wish List of their favorite spaces in that city. Or they could create a Wish List of vacation spots they’d like to visit with their significant others. Or users could create group of locations that they’ve already stayed at to share with friends on the site and on Facebook.

Yeah, there’s sharing on Facebook. The Airbnb team is touting pretty deep integration with Facebook Open Graph, which will make Wish List updates available for viewing by Airbnb users’ friends and family — as long as they’ve connected the two and opted in to sharing. Once users have chosen to share, Wish List items will appear in their Facebook Timelines. When their friends click through those listings, they’ll be taken to a special page that showcases properties shared on the site. That is, of course, meant to inspire a new group of users to check out the site and maybe stay in places they never knew existed — or at least create their own (socially shareable) Wish Lists.

The addition of Wish Lists, as well as the new Facebook integration, is part of a larger redesign that is meant to make discovering new destinations easier and more engaging. Airbnb has commissioned more than a million professional photographs of its properties, and it’s taking advantage of that, with beautiful large-scale photos. It’s also adding infinite scroll, letting users browse through spaces without having to click through multiple pages.

The new design introduces a collection of popular and featured properties to browse through. The old Airbnb site was all about search, but the redesign leverages all the new lists that are created by users, as well as curated lists from the Airbnb staff and tastemakers like Ashton Kutcher, Jack Dorsey, and Yves Behar. It also has a page listing popular properties, which are highlighted with larger photos and maps to showcase destinations that users might not have thought about.

While a lot of focus was put on building a great new web experience, Airbnb is also issuing an update to its popular iPhone app. The new app adds the ability to add spaces to a wish list, as well as the same “popular” and “featured” options for checking out new destinations.

Altogether, the new design, new app, and new Wish List functionality are all meant to inspire users new and old to be more aspirational and to step outside the search paradigm that previously ruled the site. That is, not just to show up when you need a place to stay, like, next week, but to check out new places even when you’ve got nothing planned, and to maybe even plan a trip based on a cool place you found. Will the redesign work? It’s hard to tell at this point, but hey, at least it looks gorgeous.

Nowadays nearly everyone has a mobile device with a video and still camera on it, and nearly everyone puts the best of that media to the Internet, whether it be to post photos to Flickr or Facebook, or uploading videos to YouTube. But even though there’s a growing demand for more of this amateur and semi-professional content, there aren’t very many great tools for making it available to those who want to license and use it.

That could change, with the release of T3Media’s Paya platform, which will provide a self-serve marketplace to let anyone make his or her content licensable. Using Paya, content creators will be able to ingest content from various platforms where it already exists — such as YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, and Facebook — and add “buy” links to it, quickly and easily.

It also lets sellers set their own licensing terms and pricing. But the best part is that sellers take 80 percent of all sales. That’s a great number when compared to other platforms, which generally take more than half of all licensing revenue as their cut.

T3Media — previously Thought Equity Motion — has spent the last several years delivering cloud-based content management and licensing for a number of major media companies, including the likes of Paramount, Sony Pictures, the NY Times, CBS News, the NCAA, National Geographic, and HDNet.

Now it’s opening up all the technology and infrastructure it’s built to support those clients, and coming to market with a product that will allow amateur and semi-professional content creators to also monetize their videos and photos. Paya, the platform it’s unveiling today, hopes to emerge as the largest index of licensable photo and video content worldwide.

Paya also provides a number of tools to help buyer discovery. While those who wish to license content can go to the Paya site to do so, T3Media recognizes that most video will be watched elsewhere, and photos are likely to be found on the origin site. So it provides an auto-tagging feature to instantly provide links on different pieces of content that funnel back to the licensing page.

Last July, a new media company called Big Frame emerged to help YouTube stars increase their audiences and better monetize the videos that they were creating, and quickly signed up some of the most-watched independent producers on the site. Now, with YouTube clearly defining itself as a place where premium content can thrive, that agency has raised a little bit of funding to grow its team and help more producers make money.

Big Frame is announcing today that it has raised $3 million in seed funding from Anthem Venture Partners, Daher Capital, DFJ Frontier, LaunchPad LA, New World Ventures, The Media Farm, and Social Starts, as well as angels such as Diego Berdakin, Dave Goldberg, Peter Gotcher, Clark Landry, Adam Lilling, and Dan Murray.

The company got its start by signing up popular YouTube talent like Mystery Guitar Man, Destorm Power, and Mike Diva, but it’s quickly grown to represent more than 100 YouTube channels. Big Frame has also scored a spot as part of YouTube’s original programming initiative, through which YouTube is investing more than $100 million to bring more than 100 brand-safe channels online. Big Frame’s original channel, BAMMO, mostly features special effects creators.

At the same time that it is growing its network of content creators, Big Frame is also scoring deals with big brands for its clients. The company has produced original content campaigns with more than 100 brands, including 20th Century Fox, Levis, Home Depot, Sony, THQ, and Virgin Mobile.

Based in Los Angeles, Big Frame has grown from three founders to about 16 employees in just a year, all without funding. But now that it’s raised additional capital, founder Steve Raymond told me that he plans to use the funding to increase its marketing and sales team, as well as its programming development organization. The goal is to scale up the number of views its producers get, and subsequently to increase the amount of money that they can make. It’ll do that by continuing its data-driven approach to increasing audience size and by investing in more original programming.

Looks like The New York Times’ groundbreaking, paywalled deal with Flipboard was yesterday’s news: today comes another development for the Grey Lady and how she is working hard to leverage social media for the next stage of growth. The New York times appears to be preparing for a launch of a NY Times China website tomorrow, and in the lead-up to that it has created its own account on Sina Weibo (pictured, right), a Chinese equivalent of Twitter — a development first spotted by the Tech In Asia blog.

We have reached out to the New York Times to confirm what is going on. A visit to cn.nytimes.com — the site of the Chinese edition — requires a password to enter. Meanwhile, the Weibo account has so far made two entries. The first is a welcome post (in Chinese, and translated here thanks to Google): “Hello, everyone, The New York Times Chinese Sina official microblogging [service] officially began operation! From today to push to the Chinese readers a selection of wonderful New York Times reports.”

The second is a link to a NY Times story on Amazon from May.

The Weibo account currently has nearly 9,000 followers at the time of writing, and they’re growing. When Tech In Asia reported the news just a little while ago, the account had around 3,000 followers.

That points to an appetite for more news from abroad coming to the Chinese market, perhaps just as strongly as companies in the West want to ride the wave of internet and mobile growth in a country of nearly 1 billion people.

Doing business has been a mixed bag for non-Chinese companies. Facebook and Twitter, for example, only work in the country through proxy servers; and Google has also had problems with its search business there coming up against what people commonly call the “Great Chinese Firewall,” or the country’s media and internet censors.

This has resulted in a rise of homegrown services that offer many of the same features as their Western counterparts — Sina Weibo being one example.

Coincidentally for the NY Times, Flipboard, along with a handful of other social media companies like Instagram and Path, have had better luck in China. Flipboard in March launched a bilingual edition of its app in China, integrating it with local social networks for people to share their content with each other more easily.

Given Flipboard’s traction in the country, it may be that if the news of the NY Times in China is true, it will be using that Flipboard relationship to build out that effort even further.

We’ve reached out to the New York Times and will update this as we learn more.