A new report out this morning from analysts at eMarketer is forecasting explosive growth for Snapchat’s ad revenue by next year. The firm estimates the mobile social application will generate $366.69 million in 2016, but that figure will grow to $935.46 million by 2017 – a jump it attributes to Snapchat’s ability to reach younger millennials, a wider ad portfolio, and ad… Read More
from Social – TechCrunch http://ift.tt/1F18XxG Report: Snapchat ad revenues to reach almost $1 billion in 2017 Sarah Perez http://ift.tt/2c1dpno
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In a quest to dismantle itself and become more relevant in the 21st Century, IAC-owned About.com is launching another standalone vertical in the form of The Balance, a personal finance website tailored to today’s millennial. The Balance is focused on making personal finance easy to understand, no matter where you are in life. The site will launch with more than 34,000 pieces of… 
French startup Lydia is launching a card so that you can spend your Lydia balance in every retailer that accepts MasterCard. You can trigger a lot of features in the app. In other words, you remain in control of your card, and not your bank. Lydia started off as a peer-to-peer payment app so that you can pay back your friends using your phone — gone are the tedious IBAN and wire transfers. 
The UK’s Divido is one of a number of startups and tech companies operating in the point of sale consumer finance sector. Its alternative payment option lets customers spread the cost of any purchase over a period of time while the retailer gets paid in full right away. Today the London-based company is disclosing £2.5 million in seed funding led by Mangrove Capital, and DN Capital.… 
VizEat, a European startup that operates a “social dining platform” to enable travellers to dine in a local’s home, has raised €3.8 million in new funding. The round was led by various, mostly unnamed, investors and also includes current backer Eurovestech. 
Like most VCs, we see dozens of deals each week. We’ve developed a funnel that enables us to quickly eliminate those that don’t fit our general investment criteria. The deals that survive this initial process are subjected to greater scrutiny. In the end, we invest in a small percentage of the deals we review. When we decide not to invest, we always explain the reasons to the founders. 
As a necessary function of a product launch, startups are myopic — they’re frenzied, they’re broke and they’re not remotely cognizant of the serious public policy hurdles to which they’re racing. That’s the problem. 
Turkey has been having an annus horribilis. For the past year the country has incurred bombings, the rise of extremists, growing authoritarianism and censorship and, this past July 15, an attempted coup on its democratically elected government. Still, the country’s entrepreneurs and investors soldier on. Aytül Erçil, the founder of the visual recognition technology company Vispera,… 
Ahead of Apple’s iPhone event on September 7th, the company has begun rolling out new, personalized music playlists to Apple Music subscribers, who are beta testing the soon-to-be-released iOS 10 mobile operating system and macOS Sierra. Originally introduced at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference in June, Apple Music’s new playlists are a direct challenge to… 
Snapchat has given observers another reason to suspect it might be working on hardware – the social network company joined the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) according to the Financial Times. The SIG industry association maintains the Bluetooth wireless standard, and membership is a necessary prerequisite for companies that want to employ Bluetooth in any hardware devices.… 
David Haase, a former employee of the beleaguered San Francisco-based firm Rothenberg Ventures Management Co. (RVM), is suing the firm and its founder, Mike Rothenberg, saying he was asked to run up $109,352.20 in business expenses on an American Express at the direction of Rothenberg and never repaid for that amount. In his lawsuit, filed early last month in San Francisco, Haase says he… 
The real estate rental market is a highly localized, relationship-based industry driven largely by individuals living and working in their own cities, causing many to acknowledge the longstanding difficulty of streamlining disruption to this market. In recent years, however, that hasn’t stopped a multitude of innovators from seeking novel ways to improve the process’s efficiency. 
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