If you’ve got a few hundred thousand to a few million dollars of investable assets, you’re probably in need of some help with your finances. That’s according to the creators of Personal Capital, a new wealth management site targeting the lower end of the high-net-worth client base, who say that such a financial threshold is under-served by mutual funds and self-directed brokerages but too low to warrant the attention or expense of private money managers. READ MORE
PayPal will attempt a significant diversification initiative, expanding to mobile and offline payments. If you ask Scott Thompson, PayPal’s president, “PayPal is re-imagining money and making ti work better for merchants and consumers – whatever device you’re on, wherever you are in the world, and however you prefer to pay,” he wrote on PayPal’s blog. READ MORE
From Monday to Wednesday in San Francisco, TechCrunch’s latest Disrupt Start-up Battlefield competition is showcasing entrepreneurs from 30 start-ups, all vying for a $50,000 prize by making six-minute-long pitches to a rotating panel of venture capitalists, tech influencers, angel investors and Silicon Valley players. Tuesday featured three more sessions of Start-up Battlefield, titled Customer-Friendly Enterprise, Local Networks and Increasing Understanding; here are the start-ups presented in session four: Customer-Friendly Enterprise. READ MORE
Having customers check in at a location via Foursquare or some other such service is so 2010. That’s the message from start-ups DailyGobble and RewardLoop, both of which use customer receipts rather than check-ins to give diners or shoppers rewards. READ MORE
PayPal founder and venture capital mugwump (and encourager of dropouts) Peter Thiel has announced that he will be investing in Booktrack, a company that has a plan to embed synchronized soundtracks in e-books, reportedly to “dramatically boost the reader’s imagination and engagement.” READ MORE
According to PayPal, in excess of 12 million users are shelling out for games on Facebook each month. With the social networking site estimating users at 750 million, that means that only 1.6 percent of Facebook users pay for games. That may not seem like a large demographic, but it has been enough to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for game developers like Zynga. READ MORE
Airbnb, a website that helps users find short-term accommodations in the living rooms and recreation rooms of cities around the world, announced today that it has raised $112 million in second round funding from Andreessen Horowitz, DST Global, and General Catalyst on a valuation of $1 billion. The company’s previous round of funding totaled $7.8 million. READ MORE
PayPal has unveiled a new way for Android users to pay each other by tapping two near field communication (NFC)-enabled devices together, writes Ryan Kim for GigaOM. The feature demonstrates how PayPal is gearing up for NFC as part of its larger push on mobile payments. READ MORE
E-commerce giant eBay has purchased mobile payments start-up Zong for a price tag of $240 million in cash. The company will use Zong’s pioneering mobile transactions technology to boost endeavors at Paypal, which is entering the fast-growing arena of mobile payments. READ MORE
Business-minded new media megalith Mashable road-tested some of the internet’s best ecommerce solutions for small businesses. These websites, which are user-friendly and DIY, allow businesses to take their wares onto the internet with a variety of options to choose from. READ MORE
