peerTransfer raises $ 7.5 million from Accel, and Sparks, Maveron for simple payment solution for students

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peerTransfer, simple payment solution for foreign students, today announced that it closed a $ 7.5 million funding round. Investment led by Spark capital, Accel Partners, Maveron and Boston starting capital.

The new infusion of capital adds to $ 1.1 million in seed funding to launch raised back in October last year, bringing total investment to just north of $ 8.6 million. Startup plans to use his last round to increase recruitment and development of its infrastructure, as it continues to cooperate with colleges and universities across the country to simplify international education payments.

Founded in 2009, peerTransfer is designed for foreign students in an attempt to provide a simple and secure payment method for quickly and safely make learning (and other education-related) payments. Startup aims to save foreign students, money transfer, eliminating the high fees and offering discount rates. The value proposition for educational institutions, on the other hand, is peerTransfer in the solution captures the ID information for students at the time of payment to the school knew that full payment is received and contains the information needed to send immediately student accounts.

Launch currently cooperates with 30 institutions including the University of Auburn, Georgia State University, University of Miami, Reed College, Wellesley College, and Western Kentucky University in order to streamline processing, with students some of the world of the mind and the ability to save thousands of dollars during their education international payments.

The best part is that peerTransfer is free for educational institutions and requires not engineering or coding knowledge to implement the decision of the institutions. As foreign students in the United States will lose more than $ 1 billion a year from bad exchange rates and bank charges, according to the peerTransfer founder and CEO of Iker Marcaide run looks complete transactions to ensure a greater volume of purchases and take advantage of more favourable exchange rates.

Crawl involves the removal of intermediate fees in order to save money and at the same time, work to reduce administrative overhead costs by ensuring accurate delivery and placement of funds in the student accounts.

This is an innovative, if not a bit dicey business model: this company does not charge students or school any money for their services and share the savings instead of students through their ability to take advantage of a more favourable exchange rates.

Music to the ears of foreign students to be sure. More details about peerTransfer visit their homes here.

Or check out the video below:

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Twitter founder Heello launches as a simple Twitter clone

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In August we reported that Noah Everett, founder of the Exchange site, Twitter, Twitter photos has launched a new site called Heello. The site is not yet open to the public, but a year later, it looks like curtains was finally drawn to Heello.

At first glance it seems a lot like Twitter. You create a user name, which is @ username, and you can communicate with Twitter and Facebook. You share what you are doing on the site with the commands, which is an update to 140 characters, where you can attach video, photos and/or your location.

One noticeable difference in Heello is that it offers continuous, Auto updating stream of updates, so you don't have to press refresh for more teams to come to the media is displayed in the stream. Users @ reply you can, as if they are on Twitter. If you want to retweet ping, you can echo it. You can also send personal messages to both the individual and group members.

Strange Heello is that it does not seem really original in addition to a continuous stream of updates, which actually gets annoying. Heello and certainly is not the first company to try to replicate Twitter (Yahoo Meme, Identica and Ekko also play in this space).

Last year, when we asked what Everett Heello will focus on, he told us that this will help people communicate better ad offer internal tools and systems for enterprises, including support tools/resources customer and technology platform. This version is different from this Heello paintings.

Of course Everett may just going after Twitter after the company recently released its own TwitPic competitor. It is no secret that TwitPic was completely blindsided on Twitter go into their territory. Then Everett was noticeably annoyed by Twitter. So maybe there are some revenge in this campaign?

And there is nothing wrong with throwing a little competition Twitter way, but it's surprising that there is not much creativity in Heello.

It is also hard to imagine that Twitter users will feel obligated to start using Heello due to links between Everett.

This is just one big F Heello-do you Twitter?

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