AllThingsD » SoftTech

Ex-AdMob Employees Make Paying for Things on the Phone a Snap

Tricia Duryee — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 16:00:32 +0000

A company founded by two former AdMob employees is coming out of stealth mode today to unveil a new way to make paying for things inside applications much easier.

In fact, it’s as easy as taking a picture.

Card.io, which was founded by Mike Mettler and Josh Bleecher, has raised $1 million in seed funding.

Angel investors include Michael Dearing of Harrison Metal; Jeff Clavier and Charles Hudson of SoftTech; Manu Kumar of K9 Ventures; Alok Bhanot, a former PayPal exec; and Omar Hamoui, AdMob’s founder.

Card.io is focused on solving a specific part of the mobile payments business — buying things with a credit card on the phone, whether it’s digital goods, like a song, or physical goods from a site like Amazon.

Rather than having to type in the credit card number, users just hold a credit card up to the phone’s camera, which automatically reads the card information and enters the appropriate data.

Co-founder and CEO Mike Mettler, who was one of the original product managers at AdMob, left the company around the time that Google purchased the mobile ad network for $750 million. He said a four-person team has been working on the concept since August.

“It’s super-frictionless. It requires no behavior change and no hardware dependencies,” Mettler said.

The company is targeting developers who want to sell items within a mobile application. The company is launching a private beta today that will allow mobile developers to integrate the service into its iPhone applications. It does not work for browser-based sites or the mobile Web, because they typically cannot communicate with the phone’s camera.

So far, it’s signed up three developers: MogoTix for event tickets, TaskRabbit for local services, and Samasource for donations.

Loïc Le Meur Speaks About New (and Improved?) Seesmic!

Kara Swisher — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 11:11:21 +0000

When BoomTown went to visit serial entrepreneur Loïc Le Meur early last year at his San Francisco HQ, he was stoked about the prospects of his “video conversation” community start-up called Seesmic.

That was especially due to the influx of $6 million into his bank account by high-profile angel investors like LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, former AOL head Steve Case, SoftTech VC Jeff Clavier, Zynga’s Mark Pincus, investor Ron Conway, FON founder Martin Varsavsky and others.

Fast-forward to today and the entire business plan of Seesmic has been upended, with the video part pretty much junked.

Now, Le Meur is focused almost entirely on his social media desktop client, as well as Web and mobile versions, which began as a dashboard for Twitter called twhirl.

If at first you don’t succeed, dump and change again–the motto of Silicon Valley!

Seesmic has added a lot more Web services to the client to make it stickier, such as announcing yesterday that it would allow users to access and manage Facebook Pages.

The idea behind Seesmic, as well as competitors such as TweetDeck, is to allow users to manage their various social media tools much like their email accounts.

And while the service’s desktop client software has been a focus, Le Meur is also pushing its Web and mobile versions, all in the hopes that the newest innovation is the right one.

Here’s a tour I did of Seesmic’s new HQ and a video interview I did with Le Meur about all the changes:

[ See post to watch video ]

A Picture's Worth a Thousand Words–So What Does a Big Smile in a Layoff Story Mean?

Kara Swisher — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:42:04 +0000

Maybe: Happy days aren’t here again?

BoomTown always enjoys chatting with the always sunny Loïc Le Meur of Seesmic (and will, in fact, be appearing at his Paris-based digital conference in December, called Le Web).

But I am not quite sure what to make of his big, happy smile that was in this picture above (click in the image to make it larger), which went with a story in the New York Times about start-ups cutting costs.

In fact, the whole Seesmic crew is grinning awfully hard, putting a very game face on recent layoffs that cut the staff at the video blog service by more than a third.

Money–or, more accurately, non-money–quote from the Times piece:

“To preserve cash, many tech start-ups are rushing to lay off employees and cut expenses. They are shelving their dreams of Google-size riches and getting small, humble and thrifty, all with the more modest goal of surviving the coming economic winter.”

In a less puritan mode, Seesmic raised $6 million in May from a bunch of high-profile angels, of $12 million total.

They include LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, former AOL head Steve Case, SoftTech VC Jeff Clavier, entrepreneur Mark Pincus, former Goldman Sachs analyst Michael Parekh, entrepreneur Ariel Poler, investor Ron Conway, FON founder Martin Varsavsky and an investment group called Atomico founded by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. Tech bloggers Jeff Pulver, Michael Arrington and Dan Gillmor have also invested.

Now, Le Meur is trying to stretch his dollars in the economic downturn, spurred by venture capitalists who have been pressing entrepreneurs like him to do so.

“If I can’t make this work in three years it will be a failure,” Mr. Le Meur said to the Times. “If I can and I get through this, it will be much stronger.”

In other words, what doesn’t kill us …

C’est la vie in Silicon Valley!

But in more bon-vivant times, back in February, I did a video post on my happier visit to Seesmic’s San Francisco HQ.

(Note: Many in the video are no longer at Seesmic and neither are the shows discussed, as well as the now-defunct Web 2.0 sentiments about growth without revenue.)

Here’s the video:

[ See post to watch video ]

Image Credit: Jim Wilson/New York Times