OMD Ignition Factory's four groundbreaking syndication startups to keep on your radar. The publishing industry is seeing innovators reshaping how we consume content. Trevor Guthrie, Director of OMD’s Ignition Factory East, and his colleague, Sam Olstein, the Marketing Director at Ignition Factory, shared their choices for the four must-watch startups at the ad:tech panel “Publishers and Tablets: New Strategies for Monetizing and Creating Content” that are reshaping content syndication. Laffster A startup based out of Venice, Calif., and a graduate of LA’s only startup incubator, Muckerlabs, Laffster can be best described as the Pandora of comedy-oriented content. Laffster’s developers have architected a genome based on the studies of “researchers and scholars in humor, including neuroscientists and psychologists at schools like Dartmouth College [Unlink] and the University of Colorado,” which can tailor video-based comedic content for its users. Showyou Flipboard has emerged as the leading social news site, and Showyou has based its business off Flipboard’s framework.
Qwiki. How Should Your Brand Partner With A Startup? Black Swan Farming. September 2012 I've done several types of work over the years but I don't know another as counterintuitive as startup investing. The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big winners, and (2) that the best ideas look initially like bad ideas. The first rule I knew intellectually, but didn't really grasp till it happened to us. The total value of the companies we've funded is around 10 billion, give or take a few. But just two companies, Dropbox and Airbnb, account for about three quarters of it. In startups, the big winners are big to a degree that violates our expectations about variation. That yields all sorts of strange consequences. To succeed in a domain that violates your intuitions, you need to be able to turn them off the way a pilot does when flying through clouds. [2] You need to do what you know intellectually to be right, even though it feels wrong.
Harder Harder Still. 11 Startups Reshaping NYC’s Fashion Industry. Mayor Bloomberg’s Fashion NYC 2020 initiative is worth noting for a number of reasons. The strategic study, which included interviews with 500 fashion industry professionals, focuses on how the fashion industry will continue to evolve while also acknowledging the challenges facing the fashion industry. When it comes to the facts, the NYCEDC confirms the importance of the fashion industry to NYC: New York City’s fashion industry employs 173,000 people, accounting for 5.7% of the City’s workforce and generating nearly $10 billion in total wages with tax revenues of $1.7 billion. Home to more than 75 major fashion trade shows plus thousands of showrooms, New York City attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. Find out more about the innovative winners below: Acustom uses body scanning technology to help clients create perfectly fitted articles of clothing (they’re focused primarily on pants).
Have to Have is a social commerce platform and a “registry for your lifestyle”. Maluuba Wants To Challenge Apple’s Siri With Its “Do Engine” Ever since Apple launched its voice-driven personal assistant Siri, a slew of clones have appeared on the scene. Most of these, however, clearly show that Siri was the result of a massive research project that isn’t easy to replicate. Maluuba, which is launching at TechCrunch Disrupt today, is the closest thing I’ve seen to a viable Siri competitor on Android. In many ways, Maluuba is actually more reminiscent of Siri before Apple bought it, as the company describes it as a “do engine” that ties in with numerous third-party services. Maluuba, just like Siri, also allows you to set up meetings, alarms and location-based reminders and the app ties in tightly with your Google Calendar account, for example.
Maluuba isn’t shy about comparing itself to Siri and as the company’s co-founder Sam Pasupalak told me last week, the team believes that its solution is actually superior to Siri. Here are some sample questions that Maluuba can answer for you: What’s happening this weekend in Montreal?
Am. How to Understand Silicon Valley Speak. By Hamish McKenzie On May 18, 2012 Every industry has its own esoteric vernacular (Pow! Suck on my English degree, bitches!) , but Silicon Valley’s reaches a whole new level of douchery. Even at the best of times, Valley-speak can be impossible for the layperson to comprehend. Having just returned to the East Coast after a month in the Bay Area on a work mission, I’m particularly sensitive to such insider talk and, especially, feeling like an outsider when hearing it. So, probable layperson, I’m going to help you out. Here’s a handy glossary for some of the buzziest words and terms that seep awkwardly from the Valley’s linguistic cracks.
Iteration: The banal result of repeated actions. Escape velocity: A term stolen from physics and bastardized to mean the point at which a company has become stable enough to be profitable all on its own, perhaps even to the extent where it can go public. Scalable: A business’s ability to get bigger without dying or sucking. Optimize: Make gooder.
Commerce start-up. Customer Loyalty And Rewards Platform For Local Businesses Belly Raises $10M From Andreessen Horowitz. Chicago-based Belly, a startup that is a fast-growing contender in the local business customer loyalty and rewards space, has raised $10 million in Series B funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The company also announced that Andreessen Horowitz partner Jeff Jordan, former chairman and CEO of OpenTable and former president of PayPal, will join the Board. This latest round of funding adds to a seven-figure round raised by the startup from Lightbank, the venture firm founded by Groupon co-founders Eric Lefkofsky and Brad Keywell.
Belly wants to reinvent customer loyalty rewards through gamification, digital check-ins and a iPad setup for businesses. But the startup has a slightly different take on how to achieve this. Merchants pay a monthly subscription for unlimited Belly cards to hand out to customers, in-store marketing materials and secure access to customer data that reveals sales, points and redemption data, as well as insights into foot traffic and card usage patterns. Startups to Brands: “We’re Not Your Creative Agency” By Erin Griffith On October 1, 2012 The relationship between startups and brands has never been simple. Brands want startups to help them with their social media presence, but too often they view it as a way to bolt on some generic sense of “innovation.” Startups who are looking to build something big aren’t dying to do spec works for brands, even for cash. Given the gap, deals rarely work out because the two simply can’t see eye-to-eye. At least, that’s the sense I got last week at a panel I moderated led by digital agency Edge Collective.
It was designed to teach brands how to best work with startups. For anyone who spends each day entrenched in startup-land, the panel covered incredibly familiar territory. But most importantly, startups care about maintaining their user experience above all else. All of this was no surprise to me. The first question from the audience was a sneering dig at their business models. “Because that’s not a scalable way to build a company!”
Barely 3 Months Post-Launch, Loyalty App Punchcard Is Live In 15M Locations, Nears Profitability. The mobile apps from stealthy loyalty startup Punchcard have only been on the market since February, but the company is now reporting it’s close to being cash-flow positive. Like a digital version of paper punchcards which reward repeat customers for their business, Punchcard’s app lets customers snap photos of their receipts in exchange for cash payouts or other rewards directly from the merchant. While not a new concept in and of itself, what’s interesting about Punchcard is how it’s been acquiring its business: it just switched on loyalty programs for millions of locations across the U.S., even if they didn’t ask for it.
“We’re looking at this as seeding the market, essentially,” explains Punchcard CEO and serial entrepreneur Andy Steuer of why the company has seemingly put the cart before the horse. In other words, usage and rewards first, paying customers (i.e., businesses signing up) second. Consumers use the app, which now works at 15 million (!)
Fashion Start-Ups. CULTURE VULTURE.