The virtual currency, which gained notoriety in recent weeks as its value soared (and then fell), can be used to pay for a Facebook dating app called Both Interested. The service allows users to select the friends they’re interested in. If two friends select each other, the couple is e-mailed a notification. If the feeling isn’t mutual, your crush remains a secret.

The app is free, but for those with lots of crushes, the premium account costs $2, or 0.0345 of a Bitcoin.

It seems appropriate that a clandestine match-making service accepts Bitcoins, a hard-to-trace digital currency that allows consumers to buy things online anonymously, such as illegal drugs, and now an app to feed that other addiction: love.

Original post is Virtual Currency, Meet Digital Crush: Bitcoin Gets Some App Love by Tech Deals.

Photograph by Kevin Moloney/Fortune Brainstorm Tech

Ron Hirson at the Fortune Brainstorm TECH 2012

Boku President Ron Hirson is leaving the mobile payments provider he co-founded about four years ago to start working on his next gig.

Hirson has signed on with Khosla Ventures and Mayfield Fund as an entrepreneur in residence, where he’ll get office space on Menlo Park’s Sand Hill Road and advise some of the firms’ portfolio companies.

“I’ll get experience with different kinds of companies and help them where appropriate while I work on my next project,” said Hirson, who lives and works in San Francisco.

Hirson, 39, has spent more than a decade in the mobile market. In 2001, he joined pay-per-call technology company Ingenio, which was acquired six years later by AT&T. He stayed on as a vice president at AT&T Interactive until 2009, when he left to focus on Boku. Hirson and Boku CEO Mark Britto worked together at Ingenio.

In the beginning, Hirson’s plan was to stay with Boku for two years. As that period was coming to an end, he was promoted to president and invited to join the board of directors, so he committed to staying on for another two years, Hirson said. He will remain on the Boku board, which includes Britto and venture capitalists from Khosla, Benchmark Capital and Index Ventures.

While Hirson didn’t provide details about his next venture, he said it will be in the mobile market.

Meanwhile, Britto said that Boku’s growth is poised to continue with the help of Hirson’s successor, Jon Prideaux, a former executive at Visa who joined last year as chief business officer. In the coming months, Boku will announce partnerships with companies in the computer anti-virus, online dating and video game markets, Britto said.

Boku’s biggest business to this point has been in social gaming, where consumers buy virtual goods within games and have the charges added to their cell phone bill. Carrier billing is a challenging business because phone companies take a significant cut of revenue in the transactions, making it an unappealing option for many retailers versus credit and debit cards. Boku’s biggest competitor in the market is Zong, which was acquired by EBay in 2011.

Boku would not disclose its revenues, but the company’s growth has enabled it to bolster its staff by about 35 percent in the past year to 115 employees, Britto said.

“As mobile payments become more mainstream, we’re pushing into adjacent verticals and bringing the capability that we brought to social gaming into these markets,” he said.

Original post is Boku Co-Founder Hirson Eyes Next Mobile Startup by Tech Deals.

Courtesy Paivi Kankaro

Nora Abousteit founded Kollabora, which sells patterns and material for knitting and sewing projects.

Knitting, sewing and jewelry-making may not seem like the height of geekdom, but that hasn’t stopped one e-commerce site from attracting the attention of some influential technology investors.

New York-based Kollabora, a website that sells patterns and supplies to help hobbyists create scarves, blouses, bracelets or one of the other 700-plus projects, recently raised $1.8 million in a round led by Khosla Ventures. Collaborative Fund and Allen & Company also invested in the round, which is expected to close at $2 million.

Kollabora (pronounced “col-LAB-or-uh,” a play on “collaborate”)  is trying to tap into the growing “maker” movement, a trend fueled by do-it-yourself enthusiasts who want to build physical things, be they robots, iPad cases, or in this case, earrings. The website has 16,000 users, mostly women.

But the geeks will have their day. In the first half of next year, Kollabora will expand into electronics, offering schematics and parts, as well as woodworking and home decor, said Nora Abousteit, founder of the company.

“We’re going into anything that people make,” said Abousteit, who raised $580,000 in an earlier round from Dave McClure, who runs the seed fund 500 Startups, Josh Auerbach, the chief financial officer of Digg-owner Betaworks, and Eric Wahlforss, the SoundCloud co-founder.

Before Kollabora, Abousteit helped start BurdaStyle, which sells sewing patterns, though no physical materials. The site, owned by German publishing giant Hubert Burda Media, has amassed nearly 800,000 members. Through this success and organizing Europe’s DLD tech conferences, she made connections in the tech industry, including with Vinod Khosla, the longtime venture capitalist.

“She’s in what I call the alpha-geek circles,” Khosla, whose firm led the last round, said in an interview. “The maker movement is pretty hot. Crafts isn’t in our wheelhouse, but bringing communities online definitely is.”

Original post is DIY Site Draws Investors as It Expands From Sewing to Soldering by Tech Deals.

Photograph by David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

Patrick Collison is CEO of online payments startup Stripe, which is expanding into Canada.

(Updates with PayPal declining to comment.)

Stripe, an online payments startup backed by Peter Thiel, is expanding into Canada to ramp up competition with EBay’s PayPal and widen its merchant base in a country with few options for transactions over the Internet.

Any individual or business based in Canada can start using Stripe to collect payments starting today, the company said in a statement. Stripe, based in San Francisco, charges customers a flat fee of 2.9 percent plus 30 cents for every transaction and supports major credit cards.

The startup is competing with companies such as PayPal and WePay in an online payments market that may reach $1 trillion worldwide by 2014, according to a report by Research and Markets, a Dublin-based research firm.

Most merchants in Canada currently go through banks to set up online payments, which can be a lengthy process of faxing documents and providing personal information, said Tobias Lutke, chief executive officer of Shopify, an e-commerce company based in Ottawa.

“The credit card gateways in Canada are much more tied to the banking system,” Lutke said in an interview. “It takes literally months to get a payment gateway set up. With Stripe, it takes minutes. It’s a game changer in Canada.”

Stripe has raised about $40 million in funding from investors including Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures and PayPal co-founders Thiel, Max Levchin and Elon Musk, according to Patrick Collison, the company’s 24-year-old chief executive officer. Stripe was started in the U.S. in September 2011 by Collison and his brother, John.

Unlike PayPal, a merchant’s customer doesn’t need a Stripe account before paying and Stripe doesn’t direct the buyer to another website to pay. That makes the transaction process smoother, Lutke said.

Jennifer Hakes, a spokeswoman for PayPal, declined to comment.

Stripe won’t disclose its revenue or number of customers. PayPal has more than 100 million users and reported $4.1 billion in revenue last year.

The startup is working with financial services giants such as Wells Fargo & Co. and American Express Co. to let merchants, from small bookstores to large companies, use its system, Collison said in an interview.

“Payments in Canada was so uniquely bad that this is a really big deal,” he said.

Original post is Payments Startup Stripe Expands to Canada in Challenge to PayPal by Tech Deals.

Photography courtesy SpotOn

The latest venture by Matt Hyman, left, and Zach Hyman is SpotOn, a customer-loyalty service for restaurants and stores.

Matt Hyman says he has an edge over other technology entrepreneurs: There’s two of him.

He and his identical-twin brother Zach have been in business together since they were kids. At the age of 12, they sold caramel-nut clusters and peanut brittle door to door. Their partnership continues today with the debut of SpotOn, a customer-loyalty service for restaurants and stores. Businesses that sign up can get a Samsung tablet running software that awards customers points for visiting.

“One of the huge challenges is to find someone you can partner with, that you’re 110 percent sure you can trust, that will work as hard as you, manage the business like you will, and not have any types of disputes with down the road,” said Zach, now 35. “We’re able to work together. Our vision is identical. We think alike. Our goals are aligned.”

Matt added, “It does give us an advantage over other entrepreneurs.”

While they hire staff for SpotOn, they will continue to work as co-managing directors at a company they founded in 2005 called Central Payment, which processes more than $3.5 billion in credit card sales annually. TSYS, another transaction-services provider, acquired a 60 percent stake in their company last week, according to Cyle Mims, a spokesman for TSYS who declined to disclose the deal’s price.

The Hymans, who both live in Belvedere, California, have been working together on technology companies much longer than those other lookalikes, Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, who sued Facebook and became famous in 2010 after the debut of “The Social Network.” About a decade before that movie came out, the Hymans started CardPayment Solutions in Santa Barbara, California, and sold it to IPayment three years later for $15 million, according to a public filing.

Their latest company is based in San Rafael, California, where the Hymans attended high school. This time, they brought on a third founder, Doron Friedman, who runs the technology operations from Chicago. He provides them with a much-needed technical perspective, which is largely outside of the Hymans’ sales expertise, Matt said.

Some venture capitalists argue there’s also a potential downside to partnering with your brother, as familial ties can add complications to the already heavy burden one carries when running a startup.

To that, Matt could say: He ain’t heavy, he’s my co-founder.

Original post is Twin Brothers Take on Two Companies at the Same Time by Tech Deals.

Courtesy Hotel Tonight

Kirsten Green invested as an angel in e-commerce startups, including mobile booking site Hotel Tonight.

Even with large, established venture firms and celebrity angel investors chasing hot deals at sky-high valuations, Kirsten Green sees an opportunity for a brand new venture fund.

Green said today that her firm, Forerunner Ventures, has raised $40 million to invest in digital commerce, a market she sizes at $200 billion and growing. Based in San Francisco, Forerunner plans to invest in 25 companies, making initial investments from $250,000 to $500,000, leaving enough capital to selectively invest in follow-on rounds.

This is a market that Green knows. She was previously an equity analyst at Montgomery Securities (later Banc of America Securities), covering specialty retail, and then became an investor at the firm with a focus on that market.

Prior to raising this fund, Green invested as an angel in e-commerce startups, including beauty supply company Birchbox, online clothing store Bonobos, mobile booking site Hotel Tonight and Web eyeglass provider Warby Parker.

With more institutional money, Green said she hopes that “people can start to recognize us for bringing a certain perspective, a certain network and having strength in some areas.”

Original post is Forerunner Ventures Raises $40M to Back E-commerce Startups by Tech Deals.