Hasta La Gadget!

Mobile payments company Square is announcing today the opening of a larger, expanded San Francisco-based headquarters. In addition, the company announced plans for new offices in both New York and Kitchener-Waterloo, Canada — a location that could help the company take advantage of recently laid off employees from beleaguered Waterloo-based company Blackberry which saw massive layoffs just last month.

Square moved into its new corporate headquarters at 1455 Market Street in San Francisco last week, it says, and as of today, the offices are open to visitors. The office is more than 150,000 square feet, which is three times the size of the company’s previous space in the San Francisco Chronicle building. Meanwhile, the number of worldwide employees have doubled year-over-year, going from approximately 300 in 2012 to nearly 600 at present, says Square.

The growth has led Square to seek out new office space outside the Bay Area, in locations that are both strategic for Square’s growth as well as areas where engineering talent can be found. In New York, where the expansion news had leaked out to Buzzfeed in August, the company has signed a lease for an office in the SoHo area, and plans to triple its engineering presence there within one year. The Canadian office – Square’s first permanent office in the country – will open in 2014.

Square also has offices in Atlanta and Tokyo, the company notes.

Square Wanted To Be A New York Company

A few weeks ago, Square CEO Jack Dorsey hosted a roundtable at Columbia University to weigh in on recent developments in smartphone tech, Square’s future, and specifically New York as a suitable spot for startup growth.

At the time, he noted that Square Wallet in particular would play a crucial role in the company’s growth. As with all new payment schemes, however, Dorsey said he believes that ushering in a new sort of consumer behavior will take a broad stretch of time.

“We believe we can shorten that time frame significantly with Square Wallet,” said Dorsey.

He also explained that the direction of Square Wallet is in line with the direction of all technology, in that technology is slowly fading to the background and pushing focus on the people using it. “With Square Wallet, you walk up to the counter and confirm your name and you’re done,” said Dorsey. “You’re paying with who you are, and all you need is you.”

Where outside innovations are concerned, Dorsey said he believes that Apple’s new fingerprint reader is a slight boon to the evolution of payments on mobile. “Anytime there is better protection on the forefront, to even enter the device — people have a lot of sensitive information on their phones — that will help with changing behavior towards payments,” he said.

However, Dorsey doesn’t believe that the implementation of finger-print-level security is squarely focused on payments. Rather, building security into the phone is there to protect the entire package, not just to facilitate or protect a single part of the phone.

Dorsey also pre-announced the NY expansions then, revealing that Square will be growing the New York offices by three times by the end of the year, a plan he calls “aggressive.” He noted also that he felt that Square belongs in New York for a number of reasons.

“We actually tried to start the company in New York almost five years ago, but we weren’t able to hire the engineers and designers we needed to at the time,” said Dorsey.

In his perspective, New York had more of a marketing problem than a talent shortage, as it seemed that engineers and designers weren’t meeting in a single place on a regular basis. In other words, there was a lack of community. Luckily for New York, Dorsey says that isn’t a problem anymore, which is a theme we’ve seen play out elsewhere.

For example, Bonobos moved its team to New York from San Francisco in March.

“This city has something very different from Silicon Valley,” said Dorsey. “New Yorkers are facing different issues, and the people in New York are actually living the problems we are trying to fix.”

Dorsey wasn’t entirely clear on the type of hires he’s looking for to fill out the rapidly expanding SoHo office in New York, but he did mention that the company will be “heavily investing” in bringing more women on board as they offer a “different perspective” for Square.

Apple’s new iPhone strategy appears to be paying healthy dividends for the company, according to a new research note from analyst firm Canaccord Genuity. The iPhone 5s is outselling the older Samsung Galaxy S4 at all four major U.S. retailers according to the firm’s findings, but the surprising twist is that the iPhone 5c is outselling the Samsung flagship rival at both AT&T and Sprint, too.

Early reports had suggested, as Fortune notes, that the iPhone 5c might not be selling quite as briskly as the 5s. The 5s is likely still outselling the cheaper device, but reports of lots of stock for the 5c may have had much more to do with it being well-supplied than with any significant lack of consumer interest, based on these figures. Samsung managed to retain second place at both Verizon and T-Mobile with the Galaxy S4 despite Apple’s iPhone launch, due in part to price cuts, according to Canaccord.

Despite hanging on to those positions, the bottom line here is very promising for Apple, which has shown that it can put forth a strong showing not just with a top-tier device, but also with a lower cost option which retains most of the internal tech of the last generation iPhone with a cosmetic update that likely actually results in lower costs to manufacture. So not only is Apple probably selling more of these compared to previous last-gen offerings, like the iPhone 4s when the 5 remained on the market, it could be clearing greater profit on each sale, too.

These are early numbers from a single source, covering only the U.S., but they indicated along with Apple’s record-breaking first weekend sales that the iPhone 5c strategy is really working well for Apple at the outset. If this continues to be the case, and has similar effects around the world in other key markets, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Apple adopt similar tactics across its other product lines, too, including the iPad and possibly the Mac.

There has been no shortage of leaks that claim to show off Google’s next Nexus smartphone (including this not-so-subtle nod from Google itself) over the past weeks and months, but we may have just hit the mother lode this weekend. The folks at Android Police have gotten their hands on a hefty, near-final draft of a 281-page service manual for the forthcoming device, which still technically bears the LG D821 model number.

Really though, LG isn’t fooling anyone here. The document is chock full of diagrams and images (some of the device in various states of disassembly) that depict a very familiar-looking phone sporting some Nexus 7-like branding on its rear end. An earlier FCC filing already revealed some of the juicy details — the inclusion of a 4.95-inch 1080p IPS screen and a 2.3GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 with 2GB of RAM — but this newly leaked manual manages to shine a little extra light (not to mention extra credibility) on those earlier reports.

The new Nexus will likely be available in 16 or 32GB variants, and will feature an LTE radio and an 8-megapixel rear camera with optical image stabilization (there’s no mention of that crazy Nikon tech, though). NFC, wireless charging, and that lovely little notification light are back, too, but don’t expect a huge boost in longevity — it’s going to pack a sealed 2,300mAh battery, up slightly from the 2100mAh cell that powered last year’s Nexus 4. That spec sheet should sound familiar to people who took notice of what happened with the Nexus 4. Just as that device was built from the foundation laid by the LG Optimus G, the Nexus 5 (or whatever it’s going to be called) seems like a mildly revamped version of LG’s G2.

At this point I’d usually urge you to approach such leaks with caution, but it hardly seems necessary now. As much as I love my mental image of a lone prankster toiling into the wee hours of the morning on a meticulously crafted forgery, the sheer complexity and granularity of the information contained in this document makes that scenario an unlikely one. And the icing on the cake? LG asked Android Police to pull the offending document and images earlier today — AP complied with the request, but there’s no way to get the cat back into its bag now.

It’s hard to argue with the timing, too. The first anniversary of the Nexus 4’s unveiling is fast approaching, and as solid as the device was, it found itself being outclassed by a more powerful breed of smartphone within a matter of months. The Galaxy Nexus and the Nexus 4 made their official debuts in October 2011 and 2012 respectively, and now that we’ve got persistent rumors of a Google event scheduled for October 14 floating around, I’d wager all this cloak-and-dagger business should be dispensed with very shortly. Until then, feel free to dig around in the full document below for more technical tidbits — happy hunting!

LG D821

So this is what CrunchWeek is like without adult supervision.

Leena Rao and Colleen Taylor, the show’s two regular hosts, were both out of town this week, but there was still plenty of news for TechCrunch writers — specifically Greg Kumparak, Alex Wilhelm, and me — to talk about. We weighed in on the anticipation around Twitter’s IPO filing (and what was revealed in its S-1 filing), the shutdown of anonymous Bitcoin marketplace Silk Road, and reports that Amazon is developing its own smartphones (one of them with a whopping four cameras).

By the way, apologies for the occasional bursts of random background noise. I blame the gremlins hiding in the TCTV studio.

Lark, which launched a wearable silent alarm onstage at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference back in 2010, has raised $3.1 million of an intended $3.6 million round of funding, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

I’ve emailed the company and its CEO Julia Hu for confirmation, and I’ll update this post if I hear back. The filing doesn’t specify the investors in the new round, but intriguingly, it does identify Weili Dai, president and co-founder of Marvell, as member of its board of directors.

Although Lark started out with a silent alarm, it expanded its product lineup to include a sleep coach product called Lark Pro and a more general device and app called Larklife. The company announced Larklife in October of 2012, and Hu described it to me as a way for folks who aren’t as serious about fitness or weight loss to track and get actionable recommendations about their diet, exercise, sleep, and more. Like Lark’s other devices, Larklife was sold in Apple’s retail stores (and elsewhere).

I actually tried the service out for a few months late last year and early this year. During that time, everyone kept asking me about the blue wristband (the look definitely wasn’t as subtle as, say, the Nike+ Fuel Band). I thought it had potential, but eventually I decided that it wasn’t providing enough value to justify the (minor) inconvenience — and, perhaps more damningly, the ridicule that it prompted from my roommate. In the months since, while I’ve seen an increasing number of people around San Francisco wearing some sort of fitness device, it usually isn’t the Larklife wristband.

Lark previously raised $1 million in funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, CrunchFund (which, like TechCrunch, was founded by Michael Arrington), and others.