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News Byte

Social Gifting Startup Wrapp Raises $15 Million

Mike Isaac in Social on June 13 at 4:30 am PT

Wrapp, the mobile app that allows users to send and receive digital gift cards via their smartphones, announced on Thursday it had raised $15 million in its Series B venture round. Participation in the round included existing contributors Greylock Partners, Atomico and Creandum, as well as new investors American Express, Qualcomm Ventures and SEB Private Equity. Wrapp CEO Hjalmar Winbladh told AllThingsD that the company plans to use the new funds to continue expansion, including staffing up its San Francisco office.

News Byte

LinkedIn Launches Contacts Product for iOS and the Web

Mike Isaac in Social on April 25 at 6:00 am PT

LinkedIn on Thursday launched a new Contacts feature for its website along with a standalone mobile iOS application, a product stemming from the October 2011 acquisition of startup Connected. Contacts pulls together a LinkedIn user’s network of, well, contacts, across multiple accounts, including their personal LinkedIn network, Gmail and exchange networks (though not their Facebook and Twitter accounts). As with a calendar app, users can also set reminders and take notes on specific people inside the Contacts product.

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Opinion-Sharing App Startup Polar Raises $1.2 Million

Mike Isaac in Social on February 26 at 10:11 am PT

Polar, an app made for sharing opinions and polling your friends, announced a new funding round of $1.2 million today, and released a new version of the application, now available for download in Apple’s App Store. Investors in the round include Jerry Yang at AME Cloud Ventures (formerly of Yahoo, of course), John Lilly at Greylock Partners, Maynard Webb from Webb Investment Network, Ash Patel at Morado Ventures, Sam Pullara (formerly of Twitter) and others.

News Byte

Path Stumbles on Privacy Issues. Again.

Mike Isaac in Social on February 1 at 2:42 pm PT

Path on Friday acknowledged a flaw in the company’s iOS application, which attached location data to imported photos taken with the Apple Camera app, even if users had turned off the location services setting in the menu. “We were unaware of this issue and have implemented a code change to ignore the EXIF tag location,” Path product manager Dylan Casey wrote in response to a security researcher’s discovery of the flaw. Update: As of 2:59 p.m PT., the updated Path app is now live in Apple’s App Store for download.

News Byte

Days After Twitter’s Vine Launch, Facebook Adds In-App Video Capture

Mike Isaac in Social on January 28 at 1:17 pm PT

Not more than a handful of days after Twitter launched its Vine video-sharing app, Facebook updated its main iOS application on Monday, adding the ability to capture and add video from inside the app. While the timing is curious, it’s still a relatively incremental update; the Facebook Messenger app received voice message capabilities earlier this month, a feature that has also been added to the main Facebook app as of Monday.