Neoassist: atendimento ao cliente de verdade chega nas mídias sociais. Semana passada estive no Congresso E-commerce Brasil Search & Vendas, evento cheio de gente boa de algumas das empresas mais bacanas desse mercado abrangente. Logo na chegada tive uma conversa muito interessante com um empreendedor pra lá de paciente. Testei a ginga de Albert Deweik com uma série de saias-justas sobre situações do dia-a-dia do atendimento a clientes e as diferentes abordagens que encontramos no mercado.
Não posso botar a mão no fogo, mas gostei do que ele me contou sobre como sua empresa, NeoAssist lida com as grandes empresas que são seus clientes, para que essas atendam bem aos seus. Perfeição não existe, mas me pareceu que eles estão subindo degraus de qualidade. Com objetivo de otimizar e facilitar o relacionamento entre marcas e público nas redes sociais, a NeoAssist, que é considerada líder no desenvolvimento de ferramentas para atendimento ao cliente, inova ao lançar novas plataformas de atendimento inteligente pelas redes sociais Facebook e Twitter.
I9Brasil investe na Virtual Target para otimizar campanhas de e-mail marketing da Farm. Para estabelecer uma estratégia de ações de comunicação dirigida junto ao público alvo, a grife de roupas femininas Farm, por meio da agência i9Brasil, agência de database marketing, investiu na adoção da Virtual Target, plataforma de envio e gestão de e-mail marketing da VIRID, empresa do grupo Experian. Responsável pelo disparo das campanhas de e-mail marketing do programa de relacionamento “Eu Quero Farm!” , a Virtual Target foi escolhida pela agência por se alinhar com o posicionamento e estratégias da marca, reforçando a presença em um ambiente digital. “Nosso contato com a VIRID aconteceu quando procurávamos uma plataforma que oferecesse métricas consistentes sobre as ações de e-mail, de forma que fosse possível mensurar a real efetividade das ações e com isso alimentar o banco de dados do programa de relacionamento da Farm”, conta Patricia Barizon, sócia da i9Brasil.
As campanhas de e-mail marketing da Farm acontecem semanalmente, e são efetuados mais de 800 mil disparos mensais. Ubee: de Pernambuco para aceleradora em Stanford. Fui contatado pelo empreendedor André Ferraz, da startup ubee, que comemora a seleção (confirmada ontem) para participar do processo de aceleração E-Bootcamp na Universidade de Stanford (patrocinado pela investidora Sequoia Capital), entre 12 e 15 de abril. A Intel Educação patrocina a ida da ubee. O ubee é uma plataforma voltada para potencializar o mercado varejista com uma forma inovadora de adquirir novos consumidores, conhecer seus hábitos de consumo e fidelizá-los. A plataforma funciona através de uma aplicação mobile que traz mais interação aos consumidores, lhes permitindo saber onde se encontram os melhores produtos e ofertas para seu perfil de consumo.
Além disso, os mesmos são premiados com descontos e produtos só por visitarem as lojas e divulgá-las nas redes sociais, aumentando o tráfego e a exposição online da loja. A equipe fundadora consiste de 6 graduandos em Ciências da Computação pela UFPE, sendo 4 desenvolvedores e 2 em negócios. Soon Even Your Mom Can Invest: Senate Passes Crowdfunding Bill (With Protections) Well, this just in from a dispatch on Capitol Hill: The Senate has passed legislation that will essentially legalize crowdfunding in startups by practically anyone, even your mom.
U.S. Senators Scott Brown (R-Mass.), Jeff Merkley (D-Oreg.), and Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) collectively introduced the “CROWDFUND Act” (S. 2190) earlier this month, which adds measures to the House of Rep’s now well-known JOBS Act to ensure that companies would be able to use SEC-approved crowdfunding platforms to raise money from “small-dollar investors.” While the CROWDFUND Act passed 73-26, and received bipartisan support, as one might expect when the potential for any old investor to enter the well-guarded circle of angel investing (especially in Silicon Valley) comes around, both the JOBS Act and the CROWDFUND Act have been controversial in the business community. Many worry that lowering the barriers to investing in startups could increase the amount of fraud inherent to the process. Groupon Acquires FeeFighters, The BillShrink For Business Services.
FeeFighters, a three-year old comparison shopping site for credit card processors, is announcing today it has been acquired by Groupon. The Chicago-based startup, which provides businesses with a way to find the best merchant account provider for their needs, has also been offering businesses other tools such as its new payment gateway called Samurai. FeeFighters says that the acquisition will not impact any major changes to its product line, and that most of the team will be transitioned to Groupon. In a company blog post, FeeFighters CEO Sean Harper writes: Our goals have always been to help small businesses run more efficiently, and by teaming up with Groupon, a pioneer in local e-commerce, we are able to execute on that goal even better than we were as an independent company.
He notes that the Samurai gateway and the FeeFighters and Samurai brands will all continue on as before, post-acquisition. Pair Is A Path For The Two Of Us. Let’s say you’re in a serious relationship, but you work all the time and you’re long-distance. How do you stay close to the other person? I’ve personally had this situation for the last year and a half. My girlfriend and I use Skype, email, our phones, Facebook, and everything else we can to stay connected. We’ve even been using Instagram as a two-person social network to share photos about what we’re up to each day. But now there’s an app to solve this exact problem. It’s called Pair, and it’s packed with the features you see in private social networks like Path, but designed for two people.
The interface starts out deceptively simple. Once they “pair” with you, you’ll be put into the app together. And, there’s a draw feature. The Y Combinator-backed company also provides a bunch of other smart and subtle features. “The search feature is nice. Maybe she needs to start blogging about tech startups or something. Build A Beautiful Data Dashboard With Leftronic. Y Combinator-backed Leftronic is launching a new service allowing companies to create custom dashboards that visualize all of your company’s important data.
With Leftronic, you can pull data from a number of services, including Google Analytics, Twitter, Chartbeat, Mixpanel, and Zendesk, and then customize the layout with a drag-and-drop interface. These dashboards are designed for large screens, so companies can set up a display that’s visible to everyone in the office — that way, everyone knows when traffic spikes, or when the website goes down, or whatever. For example, there’s a Leftronic display in Y Combinator headquarters with stats from YC’s Hacker News website. The company was actually part of the incubator’s Summer 2010 class — in fact, I wrote that it was one of my favorite companies I saw at that demo day. Co-founder and CEO Lionel Jingles tells me that the model has changed since then, and the company is taking the private beta label off the new service today.
Scoople Turns Reading The News Into A Game. If you’re a news junkie who wants to make the experience a little more active, Scoople may be the iPhone app for you. The app was created by a startup called Dygest. When you’re using it, you get a stream of news stories, and each story has an associated poll. For example, you can read a story about the iPad’s new Retina display, and then fill out a poll about whether you’ve preordered the iPad already, earning points in the process.
You can also vote on what you think the majority of Scoople users will say. There’s even a leaderboard of those who do the best job of predicting the the larger response. Eventually, the polls are closed and the final tally is posted in the “results” section. Behind the scenes, Scoople’s technology is following various news sites and automatically aggregating multiple stories into a single Scoople article (with links to the original sources, of course). Scoople actually launched late last year, but has been relatively under the radar. Disconnect: Ex-Googlers Raise Funding To Stop Google, Twitter & More From Tracking Your Data. In the age of endless sharing, super cookies, social search results, and that ever-present social graph, it’s comforting to know that there are some who are still prioritizing privacy. (And a few of them are former Googlers no less!) In October 2010, Google engineer Brian Kennish created Facebook Disconnect, a Chrome extension that disables all traffic from third-party sites to Facebook servers but still allows you to access Facebook itself.
The extension was an immediate hit, racking up 50K active users in two weeks (it now has 200K+), prompting Kennish to leave his job at Google to focus full-time on helping the average web user take back control of their data. Shortly thereafter the former Google engineer launched Disconnect, applying the same method behind Facebook Disconnect to other major third-party sites, like Digg, Google, Twitter, and Yahoo, enabling you to disable data tracking while you browse. For more, check them out at home here. Y Combinator-Backed Streak.com Takes On Salesforce With A Simple CRM For Gmail. Life is painful for those of us who try to manage our daily workload in Gmail. The stars, the labels and filters, Google’s inaccurate “Priority Inbox” ranking system, the extensions… well, they all sort of help out. But my inbox is still a mess and yours probably is, too. Until someone comes up with a vastly superior communication protocol (one of those frighteningly ambitious problems), a new startup called Streak is trying to create order from the inside.
Part of last year’s summer Y Combinator class, the company is bringing customer relationship management (CRM) functionality directly into Gmail. Right now, most people who are trying to track customers are using separate systems (Gmail plus Salesforce, for example). The process of forwarding emails into these systems or replying out of them via email requires extra work on the part of the user. Streak shortcuts through the problem by offering a simple customer relationship management extension for Chrome. What’s next? Ad Tech Startup Integrate Raises $11M, With Backing From Comcast. Integrate, a startup that helps advertisers integrate (yes, I said it) their different ad channels and products, has raised an $11 million Series B round of funding.
Co-founder Jeremy Bloom says the current ad landscape is “incredibly fragmented,” with “a ton of point solutions.” So Integrate offers one tool where advertisers can track and manage all of their campaigns. The company claims that its data is real-time, meaning that advertisers can adjust how they spend their money on-the-fly, based on how a campaign is doing. Integrate works with both online and offline advertising.
On the online side, it looks at mobile, display, email, social, and digital video. On the offline side, there’s telemarketing, TV, print, radio, outdoor, and billboards. For example, businesses could run radio ads through Integrate that include a custom phone number to call, making it possible to track which campaigns are paying off. Online Work Platform oDesk Raises $15M From T. Rowe Price, Benchmark. Online work platform oDesk has raised $15 million in Series D funding from T. Rowe Price Associates with participation from Benchmark Capital, Globespan Capital Partners and Sigma Partners. This brings oDesk’s total funding to $45 million. oDesk offers a “marketplace for talent” that makes it easy for companies to hire workers online for work that can be done remotely.
This work ranges from writing to marketing to data analysis and more. oDesk contractors are currently earning more than $300 million on an annual basis, and worked a record 2.1 million hours last October through the oDesk website. oDesk believes the market will grow to $1 billion by this year. Companies simply post a job for free, and contractors can apply. oDesk will provide prior work histories and feedback ratings for contractors who have used the site previously. oDesk makes money by taking a 10 percent cut of every work transaction made through the site.
Check out our TCTV piece with CEO Gary Swart addressing the news. TokBox SDK Brings Video Chat To iOS Apps. Just over a year ago, video chat startup TokBox shuttered its consumer application and began focusing exclusively on its platform strategy — using its technology to enable video chat on other websites. Today, it’s expanding that effort into mobile.
Specifically, TokBox is announcing a software development kit allowing iOS developers to add face-to-face video chat to their apps. There are other video chat apps, of course, such as Skype and Apple’s FaceTime. But the point here is to incorporate these features into broad swath of apps. CEO Ian Small says that rather than building their own video chat technology, developers can now add TokBox’s in the space of “a weekend hackathon.” The company has been testing the SDK with more than 20 developers. small estimates that 70 percent of them are adding TokBox features to existing apps, while 30 percent of them are launching new apps where video chat is integral. Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Back Marketplace For Local Fashion Boutiques, Shoptiques. As an avid shopper, I tend to buy clothes, jewelry, and accessories from both big-name stores as well as smaller boutiques.
But as a whole, some of my most coveted items in my closet are from local boutiques who carry designers and fashions that you would never be able to find at stores like Bloomingdale’s. But while I can peruse the boutiques of Chicago, I can’t access the smaller boutiques in New York, LA, San Francisco and other cities without visiting those areas. Until now. Enter Y Combinator startup Shoptiques, which aggregates inventory from local fashion boutiques and puts it online. The company is launching today, and announcing an undisclosed amount of funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock Partners, Benchmark Capital, SV Angel, Y Combinator and other angels. At a high level, Shoptiques vets and works with local boutiques in cities across the U.S. to integrate their inventory onto the site, and then sell these items to visitors.
FindTheBest Launches A Data-Driven Approach To The Classifieds. FindTheBest, the startup led by DoubleClick co-founder Kevin O’Connor and backed by Kleiner Perkins’ sFund, has been trying to help consumers make the right decisions by giving them more, and better-structured, data. Now the company is bringing that strategy to a new market — classified ads. “We think classified has a lot of room for improvement,” O’Connor says. “It’s a pretty scary process, and you never quite know what you’re buying.” What’s really missing, he argues, is context. For example, if I were to go online and try to find a used car, I’d have to do a ton of research before I had any idea of what a reasonable price is, what kind of mileage I should be looking for, and so on. Things get a little more interesting when you click on an individual item. Similarly, an apartment listing can compare the rent with similar apartments in the same city, and a job listing can compare the salary to similar jobs. FreedomPop’s New iPhone Case Promises Users Free Wireless Data.
Skimlinks Releases Full API For Web Publishers. As Developers Seek More Interactivity, PubNub Raises $4.5M For Its In-App Messaging Solution. Cisco, Benchmark And Venrock Back Cloud Storage Company CTERA Networks. Semantic Recipe Search Engine Yummly Raises $6M From Unilever And Others. 42Floors Takes Commercial Real Estate Online (Because Searching For Office Space Sucks) Slated Raises $2M To Bring The AngelList Approach To the Film Industry. Google Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz And Khosla Back Big Data Startup ClearStory. Trying To Be Mint.com For Student Loans, Binksty Raises, Redesigns, Hits $10M In Debt-Under-View. Amazon Acquires Online Fulfillment Company Kiva Systems For $775 Million In Cash. Averail Raises $6M To Help Enterprises Share Documents On Mobile Devices.
Orange Publicis Fund’s First Investment: $15M For Ad Personalization Provider myThings. FutureAdvisor Raises Funding From Sequoia To Bring Financial And Investment Advice To The Masses.