Amid Reports Facebook Is Eyeing Up Financial Services, TransferWise Hits £1 Billion In Transfers

A million pounds isn’t cool, you know what’s cool?

In the midst of reports that Facebook could be about to get into financial services, one of the startups it’s rumoured to have talked to, the European P2P money transfer service TransferWise, has hit a major milestone today: Its platform has processed £1 billion of customers’ money, an eight-fold increase — £125m to £1bn — since May last year when the company raised a $6 million series A round led by Peter Thiel’s Valar Ventures.

And whilst a better metric would be actual revenue, this undoubtedly demonstrates significant traction for the London-based company. It’s also more evidence of the money transfer space heating up right now, with a plethora of startups, especially in Europe, aiming to disrupt the banks and legacy players such as Western Union — hence Facebook’s interest.

Just last month, Dublin-based CurrencyFair hit the $1 billion money transfer mark — that’s dollars not pounds — claiming to be the leading P2P money transfer service, although presumably TransferWise would now dispute this. And in the same month, the UK’s Azimo — which the FT reported was a potential acqui-hire target for Facebook — raised a $10 million series A round, and WorldRemit received a $40 million investment from Accel Partners.

In a call, TransferWise Executive Chairman and co-founder Taavet Hinrikus refused to be drawn into speculation regarding whether or not it had been approached by Facebook, except to toe the line that, were the social network to get into the business of money transfers, it would be validation of the need to bring greater transparency to financial services.

That’s in reference to TransferWise’s modus operandi: to expose the hidden fees charged by the banks when sending money abroad. By employing a P2P model, the startup’s platform is able to undercut incumbent players — it claims to have already saved customers over £45 million.

“If someone as big as Facebook comes into the space, then I think that’s only going to be beneficial to everyone,” he says.

Hinrikus was willing to wax lyrical on the opportunity as a whole, however, stressing that TransferWise was just getting started. “If I look at the world right now… money transfer is such a humongous market. Even though we have transferred a billion pounds so far, we’re just touching the beginning of it,” he says. “We’re focused on building and growing and we’re having a ton of fun every day”.

That’s likely coded talk for “it’s far too early to think about selling” and another way to pour cold water on any TransferWise/Facebook speculation. And whilst founders speak in those terms all the time, judging by how passionante Hinrikus is when talking about the opportunity and startup life as a whole, I’m inclined to take him at his word.

To coincide with that £1 billion milestone, the company is launching an Android app today, adding to its existing iOS offering. Hinrikus says mobile offers another — and different — opportunity and that TransferWise is thinking about “what more can you do on mobile?”.

“Given that the phone is something you have in your pocket all the time, there is much more that money on mobile should mean to people and ways they can be in control,” he says. “It caters for a different usage experience.”

Finally I asked Hinrikus — who recently invested in Bitcoin exchange Coinfloor — if and when TransferWise will support the crypto-currency. “When you can do something useful with Bitcoin,” he says, noting that the engineer in him is still very excited by the technology, but that it’s a technology “that doesn’t really have an application yet.”

“I’d love someone to build a killer application for Bitcoin, and once that happens we will surely support it,” adds Hinrikus.

Real-World Services That Are Cheaper Than You'd Expect

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From dry cleaners to house cleaners, thousands of services exist to make our lives easier. Oftentimes, we think those services cost an arm and leg, but in reality, most of us can afford them. With that in mind, let's make a list of the services you thought were only for the rich.

We've talked about the idea that when money can buy happiness, you should do it, as well as the comfort principle for spending money. The basic idea is that when something really makes your life better or easier, it's probably worth the cash. The thing is, in a lot of cases, we tend to think these services are only for the rich. Obviously what's considered expensive is different from person to person, but it seems like we're just trained to think we can't afford certain services. So, let's figure out which services we tend to think are super expensive but really aren't. Keep in mind that we're talking about real world services, not web services like Amazon Prime or Netflix.

We'll get the list started with some of our ideas, but we're more interested in yours. Here's how to share your tip:

1. Enter one service per comment: This keeps the list simple to read so people can read through it quickly.
2. Try not to repeat services: If someone already suggested your favorite, click the star next to it highlight it and feel free to add your own experience to the thread.
3. Give us an estimated cost and why it's worth it to you: Obviously these things change from service to service and state to state (or country to country), but go ahead and share your experiences with cost.

That's it, so let's get started!

Photo by Rob van Esche, Karen Winton.

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Turning The Ship: Microsoft Might Have Begun A Subtle Shift From Windows To Services

Since Steve Ballmer passed the torch to Satya Nadella earlier this year, it marked a sea change in the organization: the first time in its history one of the founding team wasn’t running the show. Changes were expected and have happened. A surprising one is a subtle shift toward a service model and what appears to be an understanding that as long as people are running Microsoft tools, the hardware and underlying operating system don’t matter.

For a company that has been driven by the underlying OS for most of its existence, this is not a minor matter

It’s highly likely that such a shift started long before Nadella took the reins at Microsoft, but when it comes turning a ship the size of Microsoft, sometimes perhaps it takes a new leader to push the company in the new direction.

That’s partly because being such a large organization, Microsoft doesn’t just have to deal with the nuts and bolts of a shifting strategy, they also have to deal with internal politics and a strong culture that might fight any change. There is a hard and fast attitude inside many large organizations that any change is a threat on some level because it has impact on your power within the organization, whether you consciously acknowledge that or not.

Part of being a CEO is finding a way to manage the politics and culture and start the shift to a new way of working. Maybe Ballmer, because of his longevity and his own biases, simply wasn’t capable of bringing the company to the next level. That would take a new leader with a different vision, alliances and biases.

David Linthicum writing about the difficulty organizations have moving to the cloud pointed out, rightly in my view, that what was holding back many organizations from going all in on the cloud was not the technology itself, but that it required a cultural change inside IT to make it happen. I believe a similar dynamic plays out in any large organization when it comes to any major change.

So it was telling when one of Nadella’s chief lieutenants, executive VP in charge of operating systems Terry Myerson, told ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley that he was OK with a services model. Specifically, when she asked about the Nokia X line of phones–those new low-priced Android phones running Microsoft services announced at Mobile World Congress. He was cool with a phone running Android, precisely because he was happy to see Microsoft services running on as many devices as possible, regardless of the operating system

This is a huge acknowledgement from a senior executive that as a company, they see the value of selling services over the old Windows-Office model in which you bought Windows and ran Windows software. It remains how they make a good deal of their money.

Simply acknowledging this idea of services on many devices and operating systems is a change for Microsoft, and although it may be a quick answer to a question by a Microsoft executive, it shows a shift in vision that I don’t recall seeing before.

Of course, this one remark doesn’t mean the whole company has a new attitude about this, but even talking in these terms is a huge step for Microsoft, and if Nadella can continue to turn the ship, you never know.

It’s worth noting that I remain a skeptic that Microsoft can truly make this change, until proven otherwise, but I’m impressed to see at least some inklings that this old dog maybe could learn some new tricks. You never know.

Microsoft’s Enterprise Cloud Services Get A Privacy Thumbs Up From Europe’s Data Protection Authorities

Microsoft is no stranger to the chilling effects of European regulation, facing fines for some of its own practices and seeing rivals like Google get off the hook more lightly. But today comes a piece of good news for Redmond: the data protection authorities (DPAs) of all 28 European member states have decided that Microsoft’s enterprise cloud services meet its standards for privacy. This makes Microsoft Azure, Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Windows Intune the first services to get such approval.

The privacy decision was made by the “Article 29 Data Protection Working Party,” which notes that this will mean that Microsoft will not have to seek approval of individual DPAs on enterprise cloud contracts.

In its letter to Microsoft (embedded below), chair Isabelle Falque-Pierrotin writes, “The MS Agreement, as it will be modified by Microsoft, will be in line with Standard Contractual Clause 2010/87/EU… In practice, this will reduce the number of national authorizations required to allow the international transfer of data (depending on the national legislation).”

Data privacy has been a long-standing issue in Europe, with the model clauses for best practice very much predating the Age of Snowden. But more recent events have certainly heightened awareness among consumers, businesses and governments of how data is used (and abused). That in turn has led to a number of proposals about how to handle it in the future.

The flip side, however, has been a potential minefield for the world of tech: so many networked services and data sit on the same cloud infrastructure that is now under more intense scrutiny for data protection and privacy violations than ever before. The trick for companies like Microsoft is to meet standards set by regulators (and their own customers, and their own code of ethics, if we’re honest) while continuing to provide a smooth service without lots of hiccups. This is as much a business imperative as anything else. “Ultimately, customers will entrust their information to the cloud only if they have confidence that it will remain secure there,” writes Brad Smith, Microsoft general counsel and EVP for legal and corporate affairs, in a blog post announcing the news.

As a result of the recent decision, Microsoft says it will send out notices, starting July 1, to current customers with addendums to their existing agreements, for them to become party to the new recognition.

“The EU approval requires that customers execute a short, standardized addendum to their current agreements in order to take advantage of this new recognition, and we will create a very simple process to facilitate this,” writes Smith.

Smith notes that this will effectively mean that customers of Microsoft’s enterprise cloud services can use those services “to move data freely through our cloud from Europe to the rest of the world.”

“By acknowledging that Microsoft’s contractual commitments meet the requirements of the EU’s ‘model clauses,’ Europe’s privacy regulators have said, in effect, that personal data stored in Microsoft’s enterprise cloud is subject to Europe’s rigorous privacy standards no matter where that data is located.  This is especially significant given that Europe’s Data Protection Directive sets such a high bar for privacy protection.”

Among proposals in the works that Microsoft is hoping to address with this latest development is a Safe Harbor Agreement covering data transferred from Europe to the U.S., and then processed by U.S. organizations. The European Parliament has voted to suspend that Safe Harbor Agreement, although that has yet to be implemented.

Smith notes in his post that one of the effects of this recent privacy approval will be that, regardless of whether it does, its customers’ use of Microsoft’s cloud services will not be curtailed. That’s not to say that Microsoft has gotten approval to process the data, but that it has proven to the authorities that it would not.

Smith notes also that Microsoft’s agreements go one step further now. “Even if the Safe Harbor Agreement remains in place, it covers only transfers from Europe to the U.S.  Our approved contractual commitments, by contrast, enable transfers globally,” he notes.

He says that this is just the beginning of what Microsoft is putting in place. “We have had and will continue to do the hard work to ensure that we can comply both technically and operationally with the stringent obligations imposed by these contractual commitments,” Smith writes. “All of our customers, whether they have operations in Europe or elsewhere, benefit from the strong engineering protections we have put in place as a result.”

The developments today come in the wake of Microsoft making other efforts to demonstrate that it’s making an effort to protect customer data. Other initiatives include the group that also includes Aol, Apple, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and Yahoo called Reform Government Surveillance. And it has also, like others, implemented encryption capabilities for enterprise users.

Google updates its services to stop the bleeding

The Internet is all abuzz with news of the Heartbleed bug which was discovered in the popular OpenSSL encryption library. For those who haven’t heard, the OpenSSL library had a bug in it which means that a cyber-criminal or a government agency can decrypt all the traffic which was flowing over a supposedly secure connection. Most of us use secure connections when we sign in to Gmail or Google Play etc and send our email address and password to Google for verification. A secure connection is used so that an eavesdropper can’t read our passwords. This isn’t only true of Google services, but all the major services use HTTPS when we sign in or when you perform an online financial transaction.

Google has announced that it has updated the OpenSSL library on its servers (and we presume revoked the certificate keys) for Search, Gmail, YouTube, Wallet, Play, Apps, and App Engine. The search giant says that Google Chrome and Chrome OS are not affected.

Heartbleed is particularly severe because the bug has been in the OpenSSL library for two years and if a government agency did discover the bug (and didn’t tell anyone) then all past and future traffic to an exploited website is open for decryption. The reason is that the actual private keys which are associated with a site’s SSL certificate can be read. Once the keys have been read then all traffic to and from the site can be decrypted even traffic that was captured previously and stored away in a deep government archive.

Tumblr has suggested that today might be a good day to “call in sick and take some time to change your passwords everywhere—especially your high-security services like email, file storage, and banking.” The problem with Tumblr’s advice is that until the major services actually give the all clear, like Google has, then changing your password won’t be of any value as your new password can be just as quickly compromised. Only once a service has updated to the latest version of OpenSSL and revoked its certificates can users safely change their passwords!

The ironic thing is that Neel Mehta of Google was actually credited with finding the bug.

A few of Google’s services are still being updated most notable Cloud SQL, which Google says is being patched right now, and Google Compute Engine. In the case of the latter Google says that its customers need to manually update OpenSSL on each running instance or should replace any existing images with versions including an updated OpenSSL.

Google also reported that Android isn’t affected by the bug with the exception of Android 4.1.1. The bug is called Heartbleed as the error is related to the TLS heartbeat extension. Android 4.1.2 disabled the use of the heartbeat functionality for better wpa_supplicant interoperability.

The ironic thing is that Neel Mehta of Google was actually credited with finding the bug, so you would have thought that Google had a head start on fixing the issue and its services should have already been secure before the news hit the net. Maybe Google has become too much of a corporate for that to have happened!

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Savioke Gets $2M To Build A ‘Services Industry’ Robot

Savioke, a robotics startup out of Sunnyvale led by the former CEO of the now-defunct but influential Willow Garage robotics startup, is announcing a seed round of funding today, $2 million from Jerry Yang’s AME Cloud Ventures, Google Ventures, Morado Venture Partners and other individual investors. It is planning to use the money to develop and build its first robot, an as-yet unnamed piece of hardware that will be focused on the services industry.

Why the services industry? CEO Steve Cousins says that he and his team see a “huge untapped opportunity” to target that vertical. “Hospitals, elder care facilities, hotels, restaurants, office services all provide large opportunities for robots to take on dirty, dull and dangerous work, improve process efficiency, reduce cost, and most importantly free up people to help other people,” he says. “We see the services industry as the next logical step for robotics, moving out from behind the fences in factories and out from research labs to provide value around people, where we live and work.”

I asked, but was told that there are not yet any models, names or other details available for the new services robot. What we do know is that it will be built on the open source robot operating system ROS, which was originally developed at Willow Garage under Cousins. Savioke says it plans to begin customer trials later this year.

Indeed, Cousins was at the startup at a significant time. In addition to creating the ROS, Willow Garage spun off some eight startups — Suitable Technologies (maker of the Beam remote presence system); Industrial Perception, Inc.; Redwood Robotics; HiDOF (ROS and robotics consulting); Unbounded Robotics; the Open Source Robotics Foundation; the OpenCV Foundation and the Open Perception Foundation. Two of those spinoffs, Industrial Perception, Inc. and Redwood Robotics, were eventually acquired by Google in 2013. It also created the PR2 robot as well as the open source TurtleBot.

Savioke, founded in 2013, was not strictly a spinoff, but it is nevertheless a Willow Garage off-shoot, with not only Cousins at the helm but a number of other staff also coming over (in fact, everyone but one of Savioke’s full-timers and an intern are ex-WG). Even its name seems to be a hat-tip to Willow Garage’s arboreal theme, pronounced “Savvy Oak.”

What’s interesting about the concept behind Savioke is that it’s a signal of how the robotics world, and those developing for it, are trying for more targeted products as the space continues to mature. “There’s a unique entrepreneurial excitement surrounding Silicon Valley’s robotics industry today, and much of that is due to the efforts of the team at Savioke,” noted AME’s Jerry Yang in a statement. “As the market for service robots continues to grow, AME is pleased to offer our support to Savioke.”

And, in a world where robotics are equal parts exciting and challenging businesses (the demise of Willow Garage is direct enough evidence of that) Cousins’ track record feels like a good bet for investors.

“As the lines continue to blur between industrial and personal robotics industries, Google Ventures is thrilled to be working with an exceptional group of people at Savioke,” noted Andy Wheeler, a general partner at Google Ventures. “Steve and his team already have had a lot to do with moving the robotics industry forward. The next act promises to be even more revolutionary.”

Online Banking – 5 Services That Will Change The Way You Bank

It’s not really a stretch to say that the big banks aren’t keeping up with the curve. Not only do they seem perfectly happy to ignore the needs of small customers, but these big banks aren’t really doing well trying to keep up with the mobile-centric lifestyles of today’s urban dwellers. Between the fees and the lack of mobile support from the big banks, it’s no wonder that alternative and mobile-friendly banking solutions are starting to emerge. If mobile payment systems are here to stay, maybe online and mobile-friendly banking is next in line.

These mobile banking services take advantage of the possibilities afforded by being online and mobile, providing cool features that you just won’t see in the online apps from your traditional big banks. These services aren’t actually banks themselves, and are still backed by traditional banks, but each provides an interface and features that are worlds apart from what you’d get from a traditional bank’s mobile offerings. Here’s a list of five that might pique your interest.

Recommended Reading: Digital Wallets – 10 Mobile Payment Systems To Take You There

1. Simple

Simple has been around for a while, and is one of the leading lights in this new generation of online banking services. Simple has easy to use web and mobile banking tools, which come with rich budgeting tools. For instance, you can set goals and request regular reports. You can even deposit checks using your smartphone. Simple is almost entirely free to use; the only fees Simple charges are a $2 International ATM Cash Withdrawal Fee, an $8 Treasurer’s Check Fee and a $1 Over the Counter Cash Withdrawal fee.

Simple also sends you a Simple Visa card, which can be used like any other card to make purchases. Simple is available by invitation only, and only to residents of the United States. However, Simple was recently acquired by BBVA for $117 million, and although this acquisition doesn’t seem to have changed much yet, there’s a possibility that this acquisition may lead to Simple expanding beyond the United States. The Simple app is available for both Android and iOS.

2. GoBank

GoBank is a mobile-first bank that eliminates a lot of the fees and complexity associated with traditional banking. WithGoBank you can sign up straight from your smartphone, and it lets you send money and deposit checks straight from your smartphone. You can also use the GoBank app to create and send a paper check free of charge. GoBank has a large network of free ATMs, with 40,000 free GoBank ATMs spread across the United States. Deposits can be made at any Green Dot retailer, including Wal-Mart.

GoBank, like most online banking services, includes robust budgeting tools, such as letting you set custom alerts for specific situations. GoBank gives you your own debit card for free. For added personalization, for a fee of $9, you can even customize it with a photo from Facebook. GoBank is only available for United States residents. Interestingly, GoBank has a negotiable monthly membership fee that ranges from completely free up to $9. GoBank supports both Android and iOS smartphones.

3. Moven

Moven is a mobile banking service and app that has only recently left beta. The app provides a lot of useful real-time information, including real-time updates and spending alerts. Moven also has useful budgeting and bookkeeping features, such as the ability to analyse spending across all your credit and debit cards. Moven even lets you send money through the app using either Facebook, email or mobile phone number. The Facebook integration also lets you see a map of social events, which may come in handy.

One thing that sets Moven apart, though, is that you can manage other accounts and cards through the app. Moven accounts are almost completely free, with charges only incurred for international ATM withdrawals. You’ll also be charged if you with draw from non-STAR Surcharge-free ATMs, although this is charged by the vendor and not by Moven. Moven is invite-only at the moment, and is only open to residents of the United States. The Moven app is available for Android and iOS.

4. Avuba

Avuba is a new mobile-first, completely-digital online bank. Avuba has an always-available 24/7 helpline, and promises that you’ll be able to start banking within 24 hours of signing up. Avuba also supports authentification via text message and all the easy money transfer options you’d expect from a mobile banking app. Avuba offers free credit and debit cards. What’s more, Avuba waives withdrawal fees; even international withdrawals won’t incur any extra fees. Avuba also provides advanced analytics, letting users track their spending behavior thoroughly.

Avuba is invite-only at the moment, and is currently entirely free to use, although they are discussing a 7 Euro monthly fee. The site doesn’t seem to explicitly mention any regional limitations, but it’s safe to assume that Avuba is at the very least limited to German residents. Avuba is also one of the 11 startups that’s part of startup accelerator Techstars’ London 2014 intake, which should help raise funds to improve Avuba even further.

5. Holvi

Holvi is an online bank that aims to help businesses, events and associations better manage their finances. Holvi works just like your conventional bank account, but with a clean interface designed for web and mobile use, plus a lot of tools and features that are usually associated with dedicated accounting software and services. For instance, Holvi has real-time invoicing built into the service, alongside budgeting and real-time bookkeeping features. You can also gather expense claims and pay them directly from your account.

In addition to these accounting features, Holvi lets you invite other users to manage the same account. Definitely something useful for businesses and associations. This is complemented by an account Feed that lets all users see exactly what’s been going on with the money. Holvi even provides an online store for each account. Holvi is currently only available for Finnish residents, but the company plans to expand its services to the rest of the European Union in the future.

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Startup Financial Services Companies Come Of Age

With one eye on businesses abandoned in the wake of the financial crisis and the other on a new generation of investors, startup companies are now raising significant sums to challenge the hegemony of big banks and investment firms.

Since the beginning of 2013, venture investors committed over $800 million in new funding to develop businesses providing new investment, lending, mortgage and real estate, and wealth management services in the U.S. These startups have had their best quarter so far in 2014, when 13 companies raised $238.2 million in later stage funding — with at least $162 million committed in March alone.

Meyer “Mickey” Malka, the founder of the venture investment firm Ribbit Capital, raised $100 million at the beginning of 2013 to invest behind this thesis.

“We only invest in companies that are disrupting the experience for consumers in financial services,” Malka said. “Over the next ten or fifteen years we are going to see a whole new field of financial services brands that are being built.”

The opportunity to carve out new businesses in vast swaths of traditional financial services firms’ operations means new billion dollar businesses can be made, according to investors and entrepreneurs. “This is one of the only markets that’s actually measured in trillions,” said Adam Nash, the chief executive officer of Wealthfront, a startup investment management firm.  ”The market can be massively inefficient for hundreds of billions of dollars and somehow that is still not enough for the incumbents to go after.”

“Financial services industries are gigantic and are the least suited to making transformational changes in their own businesses,” said one venture capitalist whose firm invested in the $77 million round for OnDeck, a new small business lender.

Meanwhile, peer-to-peer consumer lending company Lending Club is entering the small business lending market, with its own offering. “Since the recession small business lending has contracted,” said Scott Sanborn, the chief operating officer at Lending Club. The company is working on a private offering to a select group of investors to help bankroll the new initiative.

Other startups like CommonBond and Upstart are pitching ways for students to receive or refinance college loans.

On the flip side of the lending and debt market, sits the Ribbit Capital portfolio company Credit Karma, a provider of credit reporting and eventually optimization services. That San Francisco-based company raised $85 million in its own later-stage funding round in March.

“If you think about financial services products over the past twenty years not much has changed. Applications have come online and things have gotten faster, but we think there’s a lot more transparency that we can create and a lot more efficiency,” said CreditKarma chief executive Ken Lin.

Investors are also looking at providing these services to the underbanked with investments in companies like the credit and financial services tracking tool InVenture.

Credit management and lending offerings sit on one side of the ledger, on the other are a host of new wealth management and investment services tools for a new generation of investor. “Over 46% of income in the country will go to Gen Y [the millennials] by 2025,” said Nash. His company, and others like Betterment have seen significant growth on the back of new demand.

“Today we manage about $420 million in investor assets,” said Betterment chief executive Jon Stein. “We grew 4x over the last year… and four times the year before that. We’ve grown about four times just about every year that we’ve been around since we’ve launched.”

Their growth, and that of other wealth management services is partially explained by the fact that the U.S. is on the cusp of an enormous transfer of wealth.

“We’ve got the largest generational transference of wealth ever, happening,” said Jarrett Lillien, the founder of Bendigo Partners and chief executive officer at its portfolio company Kapitall — a new online trading platform. “$40 trillion is going to change hands.”

Kapitall received a $14 million commitment from Lillien’s firm, Bendigo, to try and capture some of that wealth. Unlike Wealthfront, which expects millennials to take a passive approach to investment management, Kapitall wants to engage active retail traders on its platform. It’s the same business that Lillien pursued as an executive at Etrade. “It’s taking something old and making it new again,” he said.

[Giveaway] Win $600 Coding Services By Markup Service

We’re keeping the giveaways coming, and this time around we’re featuring $600 worth of coding services up for grabs, brought to you by Hongkiat.com, courtesy of Markup-service.com. Markup-service.com provides clean, valid and optimized markup for use on popular browsers, desktop, and mobile platforms.

Work on your designs and let the professionals do all the hard coding for you instead. Should you win in this giveaway, you can order web development services such as HTML5/CSS3 markup, responsive layout, HTML email templates, or WordPress theme implementation, etc.

For more info, check out their site and available examples. Let’s check out what the 3 winners are taking home.

The Prizes

3 lucky winners will be awarded with the following prizes:

• $300 worth of services – (1 winner)
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Winners will get the credits deposited into their account at Markup Service. Don’t wait. Join now!

How To Win

Using the Rafflecopter widget below:

1. Login via your Facebook account / Email Address.
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Find out how else you can earn entries (and a higher chance of winning) in the widget. [More info]

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YC-Backed One Degree Is A “Yelp For Social Services” That Helps Low-Income Families

When Rey Faustino migrated from the Philippines to Southern California as an eight-year-old, he saw his family hustle to make ends meets in their new homeland.

“I grew up in a working-class family and I watched my family struggle for resources,” he said. “I wanted to make sure that other kids and families didn’t have to go through the same ordeal.”

So while completing a graduate degree at Harvard in public policy, he put together a business plan for One Degree, a new non-profit that helps people find social services like affordable housing and job training. As a child, Faustino remembers that individual social workers had all of this information in their heads about the best programs to route families and low-income workers to.

But there wasn’t a scalable, single destination where anybody could go to find whatever they needed, whether it was low-cost medical care or free after-school programs.

He and Eric Lukoff created One Degree, a highly-curated search engine for social services. The site gives personalized recommendations and steps for people to take. Currently available only in the Bay Area, One Degree has catalogued more than 1,300 service providers. They started off scrappily. In the fall of 2012, they piloted pop-up resource desks at three schools and connected 50 families to resources like health care and after-school programs within 3 months. With just $500, they then made a basic web prototype with the largest database of non-profits and social services in San Francisco.

Now there are “thousands” of people using One Degree in the Bay Area. Faustino said that parents have been able to find summer programs for their children or subsidized housing and employment services.

Families and users can rate the quality of these services, creating a new feedback loop and reputation system. They can also easily share information with family and friends.

“We are here to revolutionize the way that people access social services,” Faustino said. “We believe that we can do this because the non-profit sector has been stuck in the Internet dark ages. People still use binders and still rely on information that’s stuck in their heads. That means people aren’t getting the resources they need quickly and easily.”

One Degree is backed by a number of foundations including the Knight Foundation, the Coatue Foundation, Echoing Green, All Stars Helping Kids Foundation, Petra Foundation, Harvard I3 Innovation Challenge, Huffington Post Ignite Good and SXSW Interactive.

They’re one of the few non-profits that Y Combinator supports alongside organizations like Watsi, which fund medical care for patients in developing countries. They’re looking to raise a philanthropic seed round soon.

PayPal Expands Its In-App Pay At Table And Order Ahead Services In UK

It’s still very early days for mobile payments, with the vast majority of consumers still not convinced that it really is a lot easier to pay for things using their phones instead of pulling out a payment card or even cash. But companies like PayPal continue to lay the groundwork with interesting implementations for how and where a mobile payment might come in handy — the idea being, it seems, that if you put out enough of these, some will be bound to find traction with one demographic or another and achieve what eBay-owned PayPal calls the “beginning of the end of the wallet.”

The latest development is now coming online in some of PayPal’s international markets and specifically around the business of food. PayPal is today turning on two features in its iOS and Android mobile apps in the UK, to let users order food ahead of visiting the restaurant, and using the app to pay for their food when eating at a restaurant by way of a four-digit code.

Neither requires the customer to present a payment card to complete a transaction.

Both Pay At Table and Order Ahead were announced last year in the U.S. Rob Harper, head of retail services at PayPal UK, tells me that this rollout will kick off a wider push of the services across Europe in the near future. At the same time, it appears that PayPal is rolling out the same features in Australia.

They also follow a successful trial of a pay-by-picture service that PayPal launched last year, which is now also getting expanded across more locations.

The new features are more in line with the work that PayPal has been doing around barcodes and other software-based payment innovations, and they stand in contrast to the more hardware-based approach of Here.

They also seem to differ in terms of what kinds of merchants PayPal is targeting. While PayPal’s Here effort — a dongle that attaches to a smartphone that turns the handset into a card-reading device — has been mainly focused on small businesses that may have found taking card payments in the past too expensive, Pay At Table and Order Ahead seem to me much more focused on how PayPal deals with larger restaurant chains. Early agreements cover eatieries like Wagamama, Gourmet Burger Kitchen and the Prezzo pizza chain.

Whereas Here and PayPal’s other services geared at smaller businesses tend to be very transparent on pricing, in the case of these services, Harper would not tell me the commissions that PayPal takes. Interested restaurants need to make contact with PayPal, which then arranges fees on a case-by-case basis.

While services like Here are about introducing new pieces of hardware into the point of sale system, the new services, PayPal promises, integrate with all standard electronic point-of-sale systems. To use the Pay At Table service, users who are “checked in” to a specific location can get a code generated for them by the restaurant, which then they can enter into their app to pay for a meal, or share with their dining companion to split a bill, either line by line or by percentages. Conversely, if a user forgets to pay before leaving the table, the restaurant can make the charge anyway.

Order Ahead, meanwhile, gives users the ability to access a complete menu from a restaurant, select what they want before going to the location, and then having it there waiting to be picked up, with the charge made at the time of pick up. The first chain to sign up for this is Wagamama, covering some 107 locations.