Can Two Young Entrepreneurs Disrupt A Market And Solve The High Cost Of Hearing? It’s not an unfamiliar story: There’s a niche market, which despite its relatively large size, goes unnoticed by most entrepreneurs and investors, because, simply put, it’s not sexy. For this and countless other reasons, as time goes by, legacy models and hardware, fragmentation, and high prices prevail. In short, it begs for new blood, new ideas, and a fresh perspective. Case in point: Hearing aids. The co-founders tell us the top reason that 75 percent of Americans don’t purchase hearing aids is due to a familiar culprit: High cost. The second reason for the low rate of adoption is the social stigma around wearing hearing aids, as many fear that wearing such a device, simply put, makes them look old. You may be starting to get an understanding of why this is not a simple problem to tackle. Not only that, but the clever business people they are, they bundle re-fittings and follow-up visits into the cost, generally using this as the explanation for why hearing aids cost so much.
Mobile Ad Optimization Startup AppStack Raises $1.5M From Eric Schmidt, Google Ventures And Others Mobile web and ad optimization startup AppStack has just closed a $1.5 million seed round from Google Ventures, Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures, 500 Startups, Gary Vaynerchuk, Don Dodge, Foresight Ventures and Punchbowl founder Matt Douglas. It’s not a huge surprise that Google Ventures and Eric Schmidt are involved in the financing, as AppStack is Google’s biggest reseller of mobile ads, according to founder Steve Espinosa. What the startup basically does for a $60 monthly fee is provide small to medium-sized businesses with hosted mobile websites in addition to optimized Google mobile AdWords ads for those sites. AppStack, which won “Best Business Model” at this year’s Launch conference, has amassed over 2,500 SMBs on the platform in a little over three months. “You want a mobile website because you want mobile customers, you don’t want a mobile website for nothing,” Espinosa says, “And we’re the only company helping people take advantage of mobile ads.” Why so cheap?
[Prévisions] En 2015, les paiements alternatifs représenteront 25% des transactions online Selon l’observatoire de l’évolution des moyens de paiements publié aujourd’hui par le cabinet ADNco, les moyens de paiement alternatifs pourraient représenter près de 25% des transactions de paiement en ligne d’ici 2015, soit un potentiel de 13,8 milliards €. En effet, selon cette enquête, la généralisation du s‐commerce et du m‐commerce a largement poussé de nouveaux acteurs à proposer leurs propres solutions de paiement, s’opposant aux moyens de paiement traditionnels émis par les banques. Le cabinet revient donc sur quelques faits marquants de l’année 2011 avec notamment le lancement de Google Wallet en septembre dernier ou encore l’attribution du nouveau statut d’opérateur de paiement à 13 acteurs français dont Buyster, Rentabiliweb ou encore Allopass et Sencillo, pour n’en citer que quelques uns. L’explosion du m-commerce devrait être telle, que le cabinet prévoit que, d’ici 2015, le m-commerce pourrait peser 13,8 milliards € en France, contre 500M € en 2010.
Campalyst Raises Seed Round To Measure Social Media ROI Social media analytics startup Campalyst is celebrating its first birthday today, and its big present is a new seed round (of undisclosed size) from Amsterdam-based venture capital firm HENQ. The company was co-founded by former business school classmates Jevgenijs Kazanins and Dalia Lasaite, plus Estonian developers Juhan Aasaru and Sander Muru, as part of Garage48, a European boot camp where startups are created in the course of a weekend. During last year’s beta testing period, Kazanins says more than 250 marketing agencies and brands signed up to use the product. Campalyst closed the beta period in January and started converting those sign-ups into paying customers. “Campalyst differs from other vendors in the social analytics space by focusing on measuring and maximizing monetary ROI, i.e. sales and conversions generated via social media,” Kazanins says. That seems to be a big theme this year — or heck, this month.
Is Direct Selling The Next Driver Of Startup Commerce Companies? Editor’s note: Jeremy Liew is a managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Follow him on Twitter @jeremysliew. The April 5 edition of The Wall Street Journal had two articles about direct selling. One notes that the key driver of Coty’s takeover attempt of Avon is the ability to move additional product through Avon’s dominant direct sales channel in Brazil. Avon’s door-to-door sales force in Brazil has given it a leading role in the country. The second article is about Tupperware’s direct sales efforts in Latin America, also with a focus on cosmetics. Tupperware Brands Corp., the maker of plastic food containers, has a surprising path to sales in Latin America: perfume and skin cream.After realizing about a decade ago that consumers in the region spent more than 20 times on beauty products than they did on containers for leftovers, Tupperware altered its strategy.In 2005, it bought six beauty brands, spending $557 million. The first is the economy.
Mobile App Directory Appolicious Debuts Advertising Platform Social mobile app directory Appolicious is getting into the advertising game today, launching a bidded keyword engine for its app directory, and those the startup powers for Best Buy or Samsung. As you may know, Appolicious offers mobile and web app directories where users can search for apps that are organized into more than 1,200 categories, such as “Preschool Early Reading” and “Travel Destinations.” Search also features auto complete and uses Appolicious’ algorithmic app search based on social, user-generated and editorial signals. The company has made a business out of licensing its app directory to retailers and manufacturers, including Best Buy and Samsung. Similar to Google AdWord, now advertisers can bid on keywords to serve ads next to search results for apps on Appolicious. So a keyword such as Music which would match an ad against a search for music on Appolicious or on a partner site or app directory.
La publicité plus efficace sur Twitter que sur Facebook Les chiffres 2012 viennent confirmer des informations selon lesquelles, au premier trimestre 2012, Facebook se fait très largement battre par Twitter en matière de performance publicitaire. Dans mon dernier article sur les faiblesses de Facebook présentées dans son dossier d’introduction en bourse, j’indiquais que Facebook reconnaissait que les publicités étaient assez inefficaces : « Relatively few people click on Facebook ads ». Les chiffres 2012 viennent confirmer ces informations, puisqu’au premier trimestre 2012, Facebook se fait très largement battre par Twitter en matière de performance publicitaire. L’une des différences essentielles dans la publicité entre les deux réseaux réside dans le fait que sur Twitter, quasiment toutes les pubs sont intégrées dans les flux des membres alors que sur Facebook, on est dans un format de bannières situées à côté du flux du profil. CTR par industrie : Le CPM sur Twitter peut dépasser 3.5$ quand il peine à atteindre 50 cents avec Facebook.
SpotlessCity Will Pick Up Your Soiled, Dirty Laundry SpotlessCity launched in January and is just now building up steam to disrupt the entire “going to the laundry” industry. Built by Sonny Bajwa and his Brooklyn team, the site allows you to find a dry cleaner and request a pick-up. Bingo, bango, and your clothes are clean. God forbid you should go for a walk of an evening to drop off your unmentionables, but let’s not get into that here. According to a January article about the service, Bajwa founded the company after seeing that his wife’s chores – cooking, buying food – could be done via laptop, while his chore – taking the laundry down the street – required him to leave the house. The service is fairly simple and places the onus on the dry cleaner to follow through with the order. These friction-reduction services are valuable, but difficult to scale. Incidentally, you can get 20% off with the coupon code “NYTECHM”. Sadly, they don’t offer service in my area so I’m stuck sitting in my own filth.
Stores Smarten Up Amid Spam Flood Have Fear Of Missing Out? timeRAZOR Connects You With Nearby Events timeRAZOR, the D.C.-area startup which raised $3.4 million pre-launch to build a better events finder, has arrived today on mobile. The new apps, available for both iOS and Android, work by using your phone’s geolocation features combined with a built-in recommendation engine to help suggest nearby events that you may have otherwise missed. The company has several things going for it, not only its good-sized angel funding round, but also a big events database, cross-platform support, and a board that includes comScore co-founder Linda Abraham, former Microsoft exec Eddie Amos and Gene Riechers, co-founder and senior advisor at Valhalla Partners. “They are experiences and events,” explains timeRAZAR co-founder Victoria Clark of the offers the brands will soon provide users. The app currently pulls in over 300,000 event listings per day from over 100 different sources, making it one of the larger events databases available. And now for the bad news: the app is kind of a mess.
Subscription Manager MediaPass Raises $1.75M It’s no secret that publishers are scrambling to find ways of making money online. On the subscription/paywall side, a startup called MediaPass wants to help, and it just raised $1.75 million in Series B funding. If publishers want to start offering subscriptions, MediaPass CEO Matthew Mitchell says that developing their own technology would probably take months of work and could cost in the seven figures. Not surprisingly, Mitchell says traditional newspapers have been one of MediaPass’ big targets, but other customers include blogs and other publications in a variety of categories like fashion and automotive. Although MediaPass supports “metered” systems (similar to The New York Times, where someone can read 10 articles a month for free but has to pay after that), Mitchell says he sees more potential in creating a specific mix of free and paywalled content, although that mix will differ from site-to-site. Investors in the round include Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp.
Songza App Review: Pandora And Spotify Better Watch Their Backs Sure, there are plenty of music streaming services out there, and even ones with amazing shareable playlists, but Songza differentiates by falling right into that sweet spot between Spotify and Pandora. The app’s most interesting feature, Concierge, sets up playlists based on day and time, with filters for whatever mood you might be in. For example, on Wednesday morning, Concierge says that I’m most likely to want to listen to something for Work Or Study, Still Waking Up, or Working Out. So let’s say I’m hypothetically getting lucky… Songza will offer me certain filters for that particular “activity” like Heartfelt, Aggressive, Tongue And Cheek, Smooth, and Mellow. And that’s only one part of the app — the part that makes people like me, who aren’t up-to-date on music and don’t have the energy to explore, seem really awesome when friends come over. But the other part of the app — Explore — is for those who love the fact that Pandora introduces them to brand new music.