Austin startup ATX Innovation has built a mobile application called TabbedOut to eliminate a big inconvenience in your life — or my life, anyway. It’s addressing those moments when you’ve finished a meal but have to wave your arm wildly for minutes before you finally get the check, then wave it again to actually pay. Or maybe those times when you’ve tried to close out your tab at a bar but found five people in line ahead of you.

ATX just raised $2.05 million in new funding to tackle that problem with its TabbedOut app.

After users download the app, they can choose their location from a list of supported restaurants and bars. Then they open a tab, which is assigned a special code that they share with their waiter or bartender. Items get added to the tab as they’re ordered. When you’re ready to go, you just use the app to pay by credit card. No more delays.

TabbedOut even includes a tip calculator and an option to call a cab.

There are plenty of companies tackling mobile payments from different angles. Perhaps the most prominent is Square, which allows business owners to read credit cards with their phones.

I like TabbedOut because it’s addressing a specific and familiar problem. The company also notes that it integrates with existing “point of sale” systems, which means that restaurants don’t have to buy new equipment to process the payments, and they get paid directly — they don’t have to wait for TabbedOut to send them a check.

It’s still early in TabbedOut’s growth. The company said it’s currently supported by more than 90 restaurants and bars in 28 cities, including Austin, Dallas, Denver, Houston, and Chicago. With the new funding, TabbedOut hopes to accelerate that growth, in part by striking deals with more partners and resellers.

The money comes from New Enterprise Associates. TabbedOut has now raised a total of $2.75 million.

Tags: mobile payments

Companies: ATX Innovation, New Enterprise Associates, TabbedOut

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

500 Startups, a seed fund and startup accelerator in California, announced today that it is launching another $250,000 fund for micro-investments in startups using the CloudFlower cloud-computing and on-demand labor architecture.

CloudFlower takes a slightly unique spin on cloud computing by offering an outsourced workforce in addition to the traditional computing power. The on-demand labor service provides businesses with a pay-as-you-go labor force that will, in theory, do all the things a human being does best.

The new seed fund allows 10 startups using the CloudFlower architecture to acquire up to $10,000 in funding in exchange for a one percent equity stake. A few of them will also receive $50,000 and be entered into another startup accelerator program in Mountain View, Calif. — though there aren’t any details on that program just yet.

The announcement comes a little more than a week after 500 Startups announced a similar $250,000 micro-investment fund for startups using the Twilio voice and text-messaging APIs.

Application submissions for the CloudFlower fund opened today, and 500 Startups is accepting them on a rolling basis. 500 Startups currently hosts a number of startups like Tello, a customer service rating app that strutted its stuff at TechCrunch Disrupt last week, and online teaching platform Udemy.

Tags: cloud, cloud computing, on-demand labor

Companies: 500 Startups, CloudFlower, Tello, Twilio, Udemy

People: Dave McClure

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

ClairMail, which sells mobile tools for banking alerts and transactions, announced today that it has raised $13.8 million in a late-stage round of funding.

ClairMail offers a suite of mobile applications to help consumers stay aware of their account status with each bank. The platform provides a mobile application, text messaging alerts, and the like to update users on new activity regarding their bank accounts. ClairMail also offers mobile payment options and ways for credit card companies to deliver alerts to their customers.

The most recent fundraising round was led by Investor Growth Capital. Existing investors JAFCO Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Outlook Ventures also participated in the round. The funding is pegged to help improve its mobile infrastructure and for research and development.

Interest in mobile banking has grown lately with each major bank providing its own mobile banking applications. Some financial institutions, like USAA, also offer ways for banking customers to deposit checks simply by taking a picture of the check with an iPhone. Data from comScore indicates that 13.2 million people accessed their bank accounts from their phones in April, which is a 70 percent increase from a year ago. About 41 percent of smartphone users also used mobile banking applications, according to data from comScore.

So far, eight of the top 12 financial institutions in the United States have jumped on board with the mobile banking platform, the company said in a press release. ClairMail has some high-profile banking names like BB&T and Bank of the West as top-tier customers, as well as more than 45 other financial institutions with a reach of 161 million users. ClairMail saw 300 percent growth in its revenue year-over-year in its second quarter of 2010, the company said in a press release.

The San Rafael, Calif.-based company was founded in 2004 and currently has 125 employees. ClairMail declined to disclose its total funding to date.

[Photo: alancleaver_2000]

Tags: banking, mobile banking

Companies: Clairmail, Investor Growth Capital, JAFCO Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Outlook Ventures

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Here’s our roundup of the week’s tech business news. First, the most popular stories VentureBeat published in the last seven days:

Digg founder: We let Digg stagnate — Digg, the pioneering social-news site which lets users vote on top headlines, began to lose momentum during the recession because it pulled engineers from designing new features to improving revenue, founder Kevin Rose said Wednesday.

New iPad designs surface in patent filings — Apple tipped its hand on future iPad designs by filing for patents in China.

Is it too late for a Digg comeback? — Digg is trying to work its way out of the traffic hole it created with its botched redesign attempt. This week it announced the return of several popular features from its previous version.

Google’s Mayer criticizes content “locked” inside Facebook — Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search and user experience, talked about how she sees Facebook, and about whether or not it’s a competitor.

RIM announces 7-inch BlackBerry PlayBook tablet — Research in Motion founder and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis hit the stage at RIM’s BlackBerry Developers Conference in San Francisco on Monday, where he unveiled the company’s long-awaited tablet — the BlackBerry Playbook.

And here are five more posts we think are important, thought-provoking, or fun:

Internet phone company Jajah aims to revamp the crooked calling card industry — Jajah, the internet phone company that was snapped up by Spanish telecom giant Telefonica for $207 million, is declaring war on calling cards.

Venture capitalist Khosla sour on electric cars — Vinod Khosla, dynamic founder of Khosla Ventures, said, “You can reduce more carbon by painting your roof white than you can by buying a Prius.”

Are Carol Bartz and Elon Musk !@#$ing menaces to shareholders? — How can you tell when a CEO is lying? It turns out that it’s slightly more complicated than monitoring the movement of their lips.

Confirmed: AOL acquires TechCrunch, founder Arrington to stay at least 3 years — AOL chief executive Tim Armstrong announced that he has acquired popular tech blog TechCrunch.

Google CEO: the Internet of things will augment your brain — For Google CEO Eric Schmidt, the next step in technology is the same that it has always been — augmenting humanity to handle information that a human brain couldn’t otherwise keep up with, and just make things work.

Tags: BlackBerry PlayBook, calling cards, electric cars, iPad, Techcrunch Disrupt

Companies: aol, Apple, digg, Google, jajah, Khosla Ventures, Research In Motion, techcrunch

People: Carol Bartz, Elon Musk, Eric Schmidt, Kevin Rose, Marissa Mayer, Mike Lazaridis, Tim Armstrong, Vinod Khosla

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

How can you tell when a CEO is lying? It turns out that it’s slightly more complicated than monitoring the movement of their lips.

A recent Stanford Graduate School of Business study analyzed 30,000 conference calls held to discuss public companies’ earnings. The results could turn the art of detecting executive deception into a science. One telltale sign: The frequent use of swear words.

The discovery is timely. Remember how Enron CEO Jeff Skilling famously called an investor who questioned his claims an “asshole“? We know how that turned out. Now Kara Swisher of AllThingsD is all but openly calling Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz a liar in her coverage of the company’s recent executive departures. And Bartz, whose leadership of the fading Internet giant is looking ever rockier, famously swears like a sailor.

Then there’s Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, who publicly called one New York Times writer a “douchebag,” and uses saltier language in private to deride journalists who don’t print verbatim the electric-car investor’s carefully edited version of reality. (No wonder he hired prim and proper VentureBeat wordsmith Camille Ricketts to help clean up his act.)

There are other “tells” indicated in the paper, such as using enthusiastic words like “great” or “fantastic” rather than merely “good” to describe financial results. Once again, Enron’s Skilling was an exemplar of this. So was Bartz in the company’s most recent conference call:

… display growth is very strong … we are making great progress on growing profits and margins … General Motors was the first to use the new format and the results were simply fantastic … So these are great numbers and a big reason why the ads did so well is they just looked great.

Great! Fantastic! So great and fantastic that the stock hasn’t budged in Bartz’s tenure.

And Tesla’s Musk has never failed to express his boundless optimism for Tesla’s prospects in emphatically certain terms. An absence of words expressing uncertainty is another indicator of deception, according to the Stanford study.

There’s no reason to believe Yahoo and Tesla are Enrons in the making just because their leaders have made a few intemperate remarks. But based on the findings of this study, perhaps Silicon Valley CEOs should watch their language. Certainly their shareholders should.

Tags: conference calls, deception, investor relations, lying

Companies: Tesla Motors, Yahoo

People: Carol Bartz, Elon Musk

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

A team of four mobile entrepreneurs and investors just announced that they’ve formed Eniac Ventures, a seed investment firm aiming to back in mobile startups.

The firm says it has raised $1.6 million in its first fund, which it will invest in $25,000 to $100,000 chunks over the next four years or so.

Eniac is the supposedly the first seed fund with an exclusive focus on the mobile industry. And its partners Hadley Harris, Nihal Mehta, Vic Singh, and Tim Young aren’t just investors — they all have high-level positions at mobile startups right now. Mehta, for example, was an angel investor in AdMob (which was acquired by Google for $750 million), but he’s also the chief executive of mobile startup Buzzd.

The firm is named after the world’s first computer. The idea is that the mobile phones are the next big computing platform and will, in Mehta’s words, become “bigger than the Web giants that emerged a decade ago.” (Plus, Eniac was built at the University of Pennsylvania, which is where the four partners met as well.)

Eniac says it has already invested in six startups, including Localytics, MightyMeeting, Instinctiv, and Philo.

Tags: mobile investing, seed funds, seed investing

Companies: Eniac Ventures, Instinctiv, Localytics, MightyMeeting, Philo

People: Hadley Harris, Nihal Mehta, Tim Young, Vic Singh

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Silver Peak Systems, a developer of tools to enhance the performance of wide area networks (WAN), has closed a $4.1 million round of funding, according to a filing with the SEC. The software company offers its clients solutions like data backup, data recovery and centralized storage.

Based in Santa Clara, Calif., Silver Peak Systems works primarily with municipalities and businesses with branch offices. Founded in 2004, the firm has raised more than $67 million to date from investors including Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners and Pinnacle Ventures.

Companies: Benchmark Capital, Greylock Partners, Pinnacle Ventures, Silver Peak Systems

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

OpenDNS, a provider of internet security, has closed a $4.5 million round of funding, according to a filing with the SEC. Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners participated in the round.

Based in San Francisco, the free Domain Name System (DNS) service provides individuals, schools and businesses with phishing protection, parental controls and typo corrections for misspelled URLs. OpenDNS also operates a web site called the Phish Tank, which allows users to submit suspected phishing sites. Earlier this month, the firm announced that it has identified more than 1 million phishing links.

Founded in 2005, OpenDNS generates revenue from ads and first raised $2.5 million from CNET founder Halsey Minor in 2005.

Companies: CNET, Greylock Partners, OpenDNS, Phish Tank, Sequoia Capital

People: Halsey Minor

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Despite a good chunk of the newest applications pulling features from existing applications, there is still an enormous amount of interest in app development that will continue for the foreseeable future, according to a number of venture capital investors. The ideas were kicked around by a panel of investors at the GigaOm Mobilize conference in San Francisco today.

Applications have evolved as a low-cost way for entrepreneurs to experiment and test the startup waters with their own company. In an age where an app developed by two or three people can turn into a $10 million exit, there’s a significant amount of interest in both standalone and derivative app development from both fresh entrepreneurs and venture capital investors, said Timothy Chang, Principal with Norwest Venture Partners and one of the panelists.

“And there’s no question it’ll keep snowballing,” said panelist Matt Murphy, a partner with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. ”Everybody’s just so excited that one or two people can develop whatever they want.”

While returns haven’t grown — likely a result of thrifty consumers in the recession — the number of companies popping up has actually grown, Murphy said. The amount of funding hasn’t grown either, and companies are receiving less funding across the board, Murphy said.

But because apps are a hit-driven business, there will probably be a number of large companies that have distribution power emerging in the near future, Chang said. It’s difficult for smaller app developers to market their apps in the Apple App Store, Android Marketplace and other app ecosystems because of the sheer number of apps on those platforms.

“When there are new distribution landscapes, distribution of content is god almighty,” he said. “And the companies that can synthesize distribution as a muscle crop up, those are the holy grail things to fight for — when you have distribution power that’s almost impossible to replicate.”

Tags: apps, funding, GigaOm Mobilize, Mobilize, Venture Capital

Companies: Bluerun Ventures, Gigaom, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Norwest Venture Partners, Red Point Ventures, Shasta Ventures

People: Jonathan Ebinger, Matt Murphy, Rob Coneybeer, Scott Raney, Timothy Chang

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More

Tonchidot, a mobile augmented reality (AR) platform provider, just landed $12 million in second round funding. Several Japanese companies and venture capitalists participated in the round, including mobile operator KDDI Corporation, media conglomerate Recruit Co. Ltd., and mobile advertising company SPiRE.

Augmented reality refers to the use of computer-generated imagery over a live feed of a real-world environment — something usually achieved with a cellphone camera.

According to Osuke Honda from VC fund DCM, a previous investor, the investment will be used to build a bigger, more diverse team and reach out to an international audience — as well as extending the company’s SoLAR gaming platform.

Social gaming is already a multi-billion dollar market in Japan. Leading mobile games portal DeNA, for example, expects to report $576 million in revenue in the six month period from April through September of this  year and is on track to generate over a billion dollars this year. Japan’s other social gaming giant Gree already has 20 million users and an extremely high ARPU. Zynga recently launched a joint venture in Japan with SoftBank.

In July this year Tonchidot launched a social, AR gaming platform for developers called SoLAR which combines location, augmented reality and social play features. Tools to integrate Twitter, Facebook, and payment features for iPhone and Android will be provided in the upcoming October product release.

Tonchidot’s flagship product, an AR app called Sekai Camera, has been downloaded 1 million times and is installed on an estimated 30 percent of all iPhones in Japan. Sekai Camera is available for iPhone in 90 countries and for Android in more than 20 countries. A lightweight version for feature phones just launched.

Getting content noticed is a challenge for everyone making apps. Join us at DiscoveryBeat 2010 and hear secrets from top industry executives about how to break through and profit in the new cross-platform app ecosystem. From metrics to monetization, we’ll take an in depth look at the best discovery strategies and why they’re working. The conference takes place on October 18th at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Sponsors can contact us at sponsors@venturebeat.com. To buy tickets, click here.

Tags: AR, augmented reality, Japan, social gaming

Companies: DCM, KDDI corporation, Tonchidot

People: Osuke Honda

Article courtesy of VentureBeat » Deals & More