Development

PayPal and Discover have partnered to serve millions of their clients shipping from in-store locations starting in 2013.

Don Kingsborough, VP of Retail and Prepaid Products at PayPal says that the partnership will bring the convenience, security and functionality of PayPal to them.

Goko, a new HTML5 games company based in Redwood City California is set to help game developers easily distribute and monetize social games. Goko was founded by Ted Griggs as CEO and Kevin Binkley as CTO.

Goko is backed by Redpoint Ventures and Aslop Louie Partners from whom it raised raised $8m in Series A funding.

Not everyone turns to angels or VCs to raise money, as evidenced by the massive trend in crowdfunding. President Obama further solidified this approach to fundraising with the passage of the JOBS Act allowing small businesses and startups to raise up to $1 million a year without requiring a public offering.

Yesterday Viddy, the social video sharing site announced the launch of their public API for developers to build around the platform and come up with new ways of sharing video. To top it off they also announced a “Rule the Beach: Hack Your Way into Viddy” developer competition in a blog post:

Microsoft in late June announced to have acquired social network for enterprises Yammer at $ 1.2 billion.But the deal has been fully completed today.
According to the Jared Spataro Senior Director, Office Division, Microsoft in a blog post the firm had met all the requirements regarding the acquisition.

IdeaMensch held it’s third gathering in Los Angeles last week to kick off a 48-state road trip (#IM48) across America of inspiring talks to help innovators bring ideas to life. Founded by advertising digital executive Mario Schulzke, IdeaMensch profiles doers to help and inspire dreamers to seed their ideas and make them grow into reality. The talks center around 4 presentations by innovators that last 15 minutes and walk the audience through the trials and tribulations the presenters faced to bring their ideas into successful businesses.

“Competition for the future is about what you are doing today,” Vijay Govindarajan preaches passionately from the stage at the front of the Metro Toronto Convention center on June 5th, 2012 at the Art of Leadership Conference. Govindarajan is referencing his new book Reverse Innovation: Create Far from Home, a book on strategy, or what Govindarajan refers to as “pushing back the fold of the future.”

In the beginning there were few variations of domain types you purchase as you had a selection of .com, .net, or .org. As the Internet gained popularity with businesses and the general public domains began to expand. you had your .biz and .us or .uk.

When we think of our neighbors to the North in Canada, we think of bountiful natural resources, open land, and flannel shirts; we don’t necessarily think of tech. The major cities are dominated by industries such as oil, resource exporting, and politics. With the latest in RIMs downward spiral, Canada should be expected to leave this industry to the Valley. So, when I arrived back in my home country after six years of sunny and buzzing California, I thought that finding a tech scene would be a needle in a haystack. I couldn’t have been farther from the truth.

So far, I’ve covered how to decide which type of app you’re looking to create and how to use your market research to decide what features you want your app to have. The next phase in making a great app is the creation of solid User Stories. Part of this will help you continue defining your feature-set, but it will also help you know what sort of brand you need to create and how you’ll eventually market your application to those users.