What you need to know - 07/06/11

Twitter acquires analytics platform BackType; Verizon bids adieu to unlimited data plan

Twitter analytics platform BackType was acquired by Twitter. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Cloud computing provider CloudShare closed a $10 million funding round led by Globespan Capital Partners and joined by existing investors Sequoia Capital, Charles River Ventures and Gemini Israel Funds.

Brightstar Corp., a services and solutions provider for the wireless industry, acquired a majority stake in Flipswap, an electronics buyback program. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Foursquare launched a new feature called the notification tray, intended to take the location conversation “beyond the check-in.”

The total value of mobile payments for digital and physical goods, money transfers and NFC (near-field communications) transactions will reach $670 billion by 2015. This year, the market is already as large as $240 billion.

Nestio, trying to make it easier to find apartments, raised a $750,000 seed funding round led by Quotidian Ventures, with participation from several angel investors, including Joanne Wilson, Rick Webb, Josh Auerbach, and David Tisch

Student Q&A forum Piazza raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Sequoia Capital, Felicis Ventures, Kapor Capital, and SV Angel.

RIM now claims just 24.7% of the smartphone market, a drop of 4.2 percentage point from 28.9% in February.

Twitter is in the process of raising hundreds of millions of dollars in a new funding round estimated to value the microblogging site at $7 billion, or double the company’s valuation from about half a year ago.

Upcoming Venture Shift panelist Ezra Roizen discusses three contributing factors to the emergence of the current angel and micro-VC ecosystem.

Verizon is bidding adieu to its unlimited data plan—a tragedy, but an inevitability