Brands used to give preferential treatment to wealthy or re-occurring customers with loyalty cards and targeted ad campaigns. However, with the rise of the social web, companies have to rethink their marketing tactics. In the world of “viral” going after “influence” may give you more bang for your buck.
Influence measurement company Klout just announced a partnership with Cathay Pacific Airways. San Francisco International Airport (SFO) visitors can now show a Klout score of 40 or higher on their Klout iPhone app and freely enter the Cathay Pacific First and Business Class Lounge. Previously, only First or Business class passengers were allowed entry.
Is influence now becoming more important than wealth or loyalty?
Klout thinks so. Klout has analyzed over 85 million people on major social networks like Facebook and Twitter based upon an individual’s ability to influence other’s actions (ex. retweets, likes, comments). Over 3,000 brands and applications use it to give special “awards” to heavy influencers. Read more about Klout’s recent partnership on Klout’s blog.
We were lucky enough to have Chad Dickerson, CEO of Etsy, judge at our last Under the Radar conference. Now we are very pleased to see that Etsy is supporting women in technology by funding New York’s “Hacker School”. Etsy is offering ten $5,000 grants for women who apply to the program.
It could be said that Etsy is giving back to its community. Almost all Etsy users are women; in fact 97% of respondents that replied to a recent survey were female. Sadly, its engineering team dynamic doesn’t match. According to a recent Forbes article they only have 11 women engineers (out of almost 100) and none are managers. It was time for them to do something about it. After all, isn’t it better to have developers that are the target demographic? As advertising guru Leo Burnett said, “If you can’t turn yourself into your customer, you probably shouldn’t be in the…business at all.”
With $50,000 in grants, Etsy plans to ‘hack down’ the gender divide and provide more incentive for women to code. They are paving the way to have more women, and thus more balanced customer insight, in engineering departments everywhere.
To read the full Forbes article about Etsy Hackers, read here.
It’s simple. “He Who Has the Gold, Makes the Rules.” This timeless quote answers your question, “Why hasn’t he responded to me yet?”
Although many people may understand this conceptually, 75% fail to live by it and ruin their chances for success. Make no mistake: This ‘Golden Rule’ drives business in and outside of Silicon Valley. Regardless if you are looking for funding, sales leads, a job or just advice, you need to follow these 5 basic rules to be successful.
Rule #1: Respect Power Dynamics
If YOU WANT something from someone else then THEY HAVE the power. If you are trying to sell, ask or show, YOU must make the effort. No one will call you, come to you, or do any work. “He who has the gold gets to be lazy.”
➢ Offer to come to drop by their office at 7 am and bring them a coffee on your way to work.
➢ Be available at odd hours like nighttime. Their free time may be 9pm.
When it comes to cloud computing, ‘Private’ versus ‘Public’ is ongoing debate as companies scale. Many companies benefit from having a hybrid model; utilizing both private and public clouds like AWS. This allows their cloud infrastructure to flex with spikes and dips in customer usage. For example, e-commerce sites need extra bandwidth around the holiday season. However, once some companies reach a certain size, moving more data to the private cloud may optimize performance. Zynga is making the move to private-in fact 80% of its game traffic is now on their own private, “zCloud” as reported in their recent earnings call. (This is opposite of last year when 80% of operations were in AWS.)
Why Zynga is Moving to Private:
1. Efficiency: zCloud is about 3 times more efficient than AWS. At the Cloud Connect Conference, Zynga said that it could eliminate one in three servers since moving its operations from AWS to its own private cloud. It can also have 1,000 servers up and running in 24 hours.
2. Tailored: According to a Venture Beat article, Zynga tailored zCloud design and eliminated every bottleneck in server components such as microprocessors, storage, and memory.
3. Intelligence: Because they own the infrastructure, Zynga has inside information on how they servers work and the computing experience that players have-allowing them to measure and adapt accordingly. According to Tech Crunch, Zynga has created custom monitoring and management tools.
The cost question is still out there…but a private cloud can provide enormous savings if performance increases and usage consistently grows. Zynga still has a relationship with AWS for flexibility although that may change as zCloud expands. In fact, some have asked if zCloud could ever become a mini AWS in itself.
Facebook’s $5 billion IPO filing will make it the largest web company IPO in history. The engineers that stuck it out for the long haul are doing victory dances. However what does that mean for the rest of us? What other ripple effects will the IPO have on our economy?
1. Real estate prices: According to a talk on NPR this morning, real estate agents are getting ready to see a spike in Silicon Valley new home purchases from the newly rich Facebook employees. This may create a buying frenzy in the whole area, carrying over to other bay area residential and business areas.
2. Mobile advertising: According to the S-1 filing, Facebook plans to massively expand its mobile reach. In the past four months, mobile users have increased 21%. Currently Facebook mobile is ad free, although a high percentage of Facebook’s revenue has come from its site advertising. As we use our mobile device more and more, we can only expect advertisers to follow us.
3. Social Gaming:With the IPO filing, Facebook has to spend about $10B of the money they raise. Given that third party games still generate a lot of revenue for Facebook, many wonder if they won’t try to invest in the space themselves and act as a first party publisher. Internal development would allow Facebook to be leader in the space and create a fuller mobile offering.
4. Privacy: Everyone wants to know how Facebook will handle privacy post IPO. An IPO means Wall Street expectations to monetize, monetize, monetize. Unfortunately for consumers this could be our personal data. It will be interesting to see how the company will still build a community that caters to us while making money off of us.
We may see massive Facebook changes now that it’s married to Wall Street. However, remember that Mark Zuckerberg still own nearly 28 % of the company. Hopefully with his leadership, we’ll still be old school messaging and sharing. Who knows, maybe we’ll start throwing sheep at each other again.
The word ”scale” to startups typically means rapid growth after launching their product. “Scale” progress is measured by subscribers per month or transactions per second. However, Yobie Benjamin, Global Chief Technology Officer of Citigroup ICG/GTS says “scale” has a much wider definition when applied to larger enterprises like financial service companies.
What can we learn from industry leaders in massive scaling? What technologies do you need to provide in order to partner with the global leaders like Citigroup? Read our interview with Yobie to blow your mind on a whole new type of scaling.
Q: What is scale in your world?
A: In most large financial institutions, number of users, concurrency, and response time are just the beginning — table stakes. Now add on:
1. Response to compliance matters in near real-time
2. Pronounced security for the entity, its regulators and customers
3. Reality that the world is not America and that each and every country no matter how small can affect global operations.
Think of a single multi-national client that operates in over a hundred countries that includes unstable governments. Now pretend that the financial company takes in and makes payments in massive retail volume. Now multiply that multi-national client by thousands and then by an extension of their customers in the hundreds of millions of individuals.
Q: What key things do companies need to address to scale globally?
A: Regulatory issues are at the top of the list but can be broken down into other matters that are no less important. For example, in the EU privacy is a serious matter and is very different from the American point-of-view.
Another example are the discreet laws of individual countries — The crime of insulting a monarch, a throwback to a bygone era of absolute
sovereign power is still very much in force in Thailand. In a leading large important Asian country, promoting or “seen as facilitating” an “outlaw group” can lead to charter revocation.
Q: You mentioned latency challenges when companies try to scale in countries that have intense regulatory issues and government filtering. How does a company best plan to expand in those types of countries?
A: Almost all countries monitor most communications that cross through their digital borders. Some look at everything, every word, bit and
byte. Some look for key words. Financial transactions are generally tracked, particularly those that cross a threshold that triggers AML
(anti-money laundering), monitoring of terrorist financing, etc. Some filtering technologies used by countries are better than others
and inevitably affect response time performance. There is no way around it in some countries. In others, one can use adjacent networks
but it’s not easy and it can be construed as a violation of regulations.
Q: Many startups in the infrastructure and cloud services space are targeting financial institutions as partners and customers. What do they need to address to meet your particular scaling needs?
A: Automated KYC (know your customer) and AML solutions would be an area of extreme interest. It has to be in real time.
Everyone scoffs at “me too” products. However, the scoffed at should be feared. When done correctly a ‘me too’ can surpass what it was copying.
“Look at Ali Baba. It started in China as an imitation of Yahoo,” said Oded Shenkar, in a recent GigaOm article. Oded is the Ford motor Chair and professor at Fisher College of Business at Ohio State University. “Now it’s in a position to buy the company it was imitating.”
How to Prevent Copycats: Four lessons from GigaOm
- Differiate: Realize your main idea is not unique, but how you differentiate is: Many others thinking through similar solutions as your company is; the key to success is to understand all the players and ensure you solve the problem better/differently.
- Think global: Many copycats just take your product to a different international location
Cloud computing provider and our Under the Radar alum, Joyent just secured $85 million in their Series D round! According to a TechCrunch article, Joyent plans to roll out a collection of “seamlessly connected high performance clouds” serving global corporations on every continent.
With more and more money being poured into cloud software and services, investors are betting that corporations will abandon their back room servers and trust more of their data in the cloud.
All Chips In?
However, not every company is transitioning their data over as fast as Joyent’s customers. According to Michael Driscoll, CEO of predictive data analysis start-up MetaMarkets, “There is still a cultural obstacle with cloud. Although companies trust their private data with large banks or physical boxes in their back room, some are still hesitant to move it into the cloud.”
What makes enterprises finally place a bet on the cloud? How will they resolve data privacy concerns? What other emerging cloud startups will provide such valuable benefits that keeping data in the “back room boxes” is no longer an option?
Although many companies are moving their services over to the cloud (Symantec just bought Live Office in efforts to bolster cloud offering in email archiving), others warn that the ‘cloud’ isn’t all castles in the sky.
Venture Beat wrote an article reminding us of the downside of cloud computing. In the article they mention 4 reasons for not drinking cloud flavored kool-aid:
1. Loss of control: When something goes wrong you cannot just log into your own servers. “You are at the mercy of someone else,” states the article.
2. Prioritization is thwarted: The cloud levels the playing field so the CEO cannot get special requests done any faster than someone lower down the food chain. There is no hierarchy in the cloud.
3. Limited customization: According to Venture Beat, current offerings are mostly a one size fits all solution.
4. You still need an IT staff: Moving to the cloud doesn’t always mean you can get rid of all of your staff. You still need them to support the new infrastructure.
The question isn’t will the cloud go away, but rather how will it change to address these concerns? As we are still in the beginning of a new era, will customization and prioritization features be added? Who will be the top players to do so?
As with many industry trade shows, The Consumer Electronics show in Vegas is said to be a showcase for emerging trends. They key is to determine which consumer trends have longevity and which are fads so enterprise solutions can be quickly created to capitalize on the momentum.
Reporters from Venture Beat to the Washington Post write about processing power, speed, and our evolution to a mobile world. Many bloggers from the CES floor shout out the praises of the Nokia Lumia, demonstrating that the iPhone may finally have a fashionable competitor. Some are also excited about the rise of PC ‘ultrabooks’, while others are hopeful that the Android operating system can do for tablets what it did for mobile phones. Enabling this mobility are the new multi quad core processes from Qualcomm and Nvidia. Our handheld devices now better compete with desktops and television allowing us to consume both entertainment and spreadsheets as we commute.
Mobile is not a passing fad but rather a new way of living. How will the enterprise adapt to advances in consumer technology and our preference for smaller devices? Who will lead the way for security applications, corporate data transfers, and tablet visualization technologies? After all, no executive wants to been seen with a large laptop and projector anymore. Unless, of course, there is a mobile app for it.
In addition to automatically securing your contacts from email and social media platforms, Contactually gives you a dashboard with automatic alerts that remind you to follow up with them (it even has a pre-defined bucket for your contacts called ‘warm leads’). However Contactually isn’t the only player in the space. Ecquire also eliminates data entry by automatically updating your contact list from email interchanges. Connected (acquired by Linkedin) allows you to set reminders for connections as well as add notes and tags to each contact provide more context. And then there is Rapportive which provides profile information on those you are currently communicating with. If you want to send out multiple emails to different contacts you can use Tout to quickly create templates.
With all these new tools helping us combat inbox implosion and tedious data entry, what will happen to the legacy CRM systems? In addition, will voice recognition services like Siri evolve and integrate into our email management platforms? And more importantly, which new tools will transform from a management feature to a full solution company?
With the word “cloud’ being used to describe an increasingly large assortment of companies and services, many often wonder if the term isn’t as challenging to define as a fluffy image in the sky.
1. The enterprise cloud that utilizes compute and memory space as a commodity and network bandwidth as a utility
2. The consumer cloud, which he described pretty much as “The internet”
However, the two clouds are intricately connected. For example, as enterprises use memory to improve latency, consumers benefit from faster service times. And as consumers use their personal devices for work applications, enterprises will have to ensure their cloud infrastructure can support the shift in doing business. What will be the new technologies that merge the clouds together? And will we see a whole term new arise as the ‘cloud’ is starting to mean almost everything?
As we settle into 2012 many are asking what will be the new trends that define the year. With Facebook poised to IPO at a ~$100B valuation, no one doubts that social media has forever changed the way we interact with one another. Successful enterprises won’t but begrudge the trend but rather embrace it to become more flexible. New technologies will emerge to help support the rise of enterprise consumerization, or as Marc Benioff coined it, “The Social Enterprise.”
Social media isn’t the only trend that has disrupted our lives. Consumers are increasingly turning to their mobile devices to do everything from track their stocks to read the news. During the last week of 2011 a record high of 1.2 billion iOS and Android apps were downloaded. As consumers become increasing dependent upon their handheld devices in 2012, how will the companies overcome security and infrastructure challenges to capitalize on mobile?
Where do you do your holiday shopping? Are you a last minute in store shopper? Do you shop throughout the year so you never feel the rush? Do you shop online? Here are some interesting stats on shopping trends this year.
2011 Shopping Stats:
*Shoppers spent much more money online this year than last year, and they did a lot of their shopping on tablets like the iPad.
*So far this holiday season, shoppers have spent $32 billion online, 15% more than last year.
*Last week was the heaviest online shopping week on record, and last weekend was the second-heaviest weekend.
*12% of online visits of retailers websites came from mobile devices. (i.e. Tablets and mobile phones.) Up from 5% in 2010).
*9% of sales came from mobile phones.
*Mobile commerce peaked at 10 p.m. on Cyber Monday.
In the spirit of casual Friday, here are a few goofy quotes to get this long weekend started. Enjoy your weekend!
Words to live by from Yogi Berra.
“It ain’t over ’til it’s over.”
“Never answer an anonymous letter.”
“I usually take a two hour nap from one to four.”
“It’s deja vu all over again.”
“When you come to a fork in the road….Take it.”
“I didn’t really say everything I said.”
“You can observe a lot by watching.”
“The future ain’t what it used to be.”
“It gets late early out here.”
“If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.”
“If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them.”
Leading up to our Under the Radar Conference, we are searching high and low for the best mobile payments companies out there. It’s a pretty saturated market and everyone is trying to take their own spin on it to make it unique. You can make payments: with your phone, with your webcam, with a pin, with a barcode, with a chip, with a credit card reader… the possibilities are limitless. If you’re not sure where to get started, consider the following:
Someone’s gotta be making money, so at what point is the company you are using getting their cut?
Is there a cost per transaction?
Is there a set fee per transaction, or is it a percentage?
Is that percentage more or less than the average credit card fees?
How easy is integration for the merchant?
How much equipment if any is required? How much does that cost?
Do both the merchant and the customer have to download an application? Is that likely to happen?
Is it easy to use?
Once you get those ducks in a row and you like the answers you’re left with, you’ve found your winner! Here are some options to get the ball rolling:
Mobile Based:
Square offers an easy to use, free credit card reader that plugs into a phone or iPad. It’s simple to sign up. There is no extra equipment, complicated contracts, monthly fees or merchant account required.
Using Geo Location technology, the merchant is automatically displayed on your phone. To initiate a payment, simply tap the PAY STORE button and once the store is confirmed on your screen, enter your pin, the payment amount due and hit PAY NOW.
Venmo is a social payments platform that makes it easy for friends to exchange money using their phones. Transactions occur through SMS messages, mobile apps, or the Web. The social part comes in when people attach messages to each payment, which can be broadcast across Twitter or Facebook.
Card.io offers an SDK to developers that makes inputting credit card information as easy as holding your card in front of your smartphone’s camera.
Cimbal is a mobile promotion and payment network allowing consumers to use their smartphones to find great deals and easily pay for them. Businesses can offer incentives with an easy-to-use, intuitive loyalty program to draw new customers and create repeat customers.
Web Based:
Gives users a 4-digit pin to enter at checkouts that let’s them avoid the hassle of entering in a bunch of numbers and information.
Dwolla provides a free web based software platform which allows users to send, receive, and request funds from any other user. Dwolla’s maximum transaction cost is 25 cents per transaction.
Jumio offers an advanced technology that increases security and ease of use for online credit card payments. Jumio is the inventor of Netswipe, a patent pending solution that turns a webcam into a credit card reader. Netswipe is online card present transaction.
PrePay is an online marketplace that sells store credit on behalf of local merchants with the purpose of guaranteeing future customer loyalty.
Very stealth still… But… It might be something big?
In business, loyalty is king. Every business owner wants to acquire new customers, and more importantly, keep them coming back. There are a slew of startups out there trying to tap into this lucrative space, but it is yet to be decided who will win out. Will customers respond to QR codes on receipts? Will they respond to virtual stamp cards that give them a free coffee after they’ve bought twelve? What model is going to give the business owner the control and information they need, and simultaneously make the customer feel like they are getting a deal or being rewarded for their loyalty?
Here’s a few startups we think are getting close to getting it right:
1. Chatterfly:@chatterfly Chatterfly provides small to medium sized businesses with a total mobile loyalty reward and customer retention solution. It’s solutions enable businesses to motivate and keep their customers coming back through a unique social network mobile rewards platform based on Android and iPhone. Loyal customers become a marketing sales force for the business via Chatterfly’s social network platform.
2. RewardLoop:@rewardloop RewardLoop provides card-less loyalty programs for the mobile era. The company’s patent-pending innovations enable a merchant of any size to simply and cost-efficiently identify their most profitable customers, and engage them in individualized, real-time customer loyalty relationships via their mobile devices. Only RewardLoop lets merchants reward customers based on real-time transactional data from their Point of Sale (POS) systems rather than ‘check-ins’ and game mechanics. In addition to customer loyalty, RewardLoop is noted for its unique ability to provide access to real-time POS transaction data for market leaders in mobile payments, social media, daily deals, coupons, and personal financial management services.
3. RewardMe: @rewardme RewardMe was created by a group of passionate Silicon Valley technologists who came to a startling realization: while most businesses rely on powerful CRM solutions to drive sales, one category of businesses has yet to embrace it – local brick and mortar stores. Instead they rely heavily on questionable loyalty solutions to drive repeat customer business, forcing customers to manage a fragmented assortment of loyalty accounts and wallet-busting cards that ask much, and offer little in return.
4. WeReward:@wereward WeReward is a wholly owned property of IZEA Holdings, Inc. and is a publicly traded company under the ticker IZEA. IZEA is a world leader in social media sponsorship, operating multiple marketplaces including WeReward, SponsoredTweets, andSocialSpark. IZEA connects advertisers with social media publishers, helping them monetize their social media presence. The company has completed over two million social media sponsorships for customers ranging from small local businesses to Fortune 50 organizations.
5. PlacePop:@PlacePop PlacePop fills a gap in the geosocial networking market by providing a simple location-based social app for consumers, combined with a mobile, web-based affinity marketing platform for local businesses.
6. Perkville:@perkvilleinc Perkville provides businesses with a reward program to drive customer loyalty and acquisition. Businesses can create a point based reward program in minutes and add deals to target prospects and lost customers. It integrates with point of sale (POS) systems such as MINDBODY but also uses an iPad kiosk to log customer visits when POS integration isn’t possible.
1. Sharpen the focus.
Start with a well-honed statement of the problem at hand. Edgy is better than fuzzy. The best topic statements focus outward on a specific customer need or service enhancement rather than inward on some organizational goal.
Getting my daily coffee in San Francisco, I always pay with Square. Square is a mobile payments startup that allows users to accept payments on their mobile devices through a small credit card reader that plugs into the headphone jack. It’s easy, quick, and allows people like me to never have to worry about going to the ATM or carrying cash. Last week Square raised $100 Million dollars in funding from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers proving yet again that mobile payments are the future. Below is a report that backs this statement up even further:
About MOG:
MOG Inc. is a next-generation music media company founded in June 2005 by David Hyman, former CEO for Gracenote. MOG has one simple goal: to perfect your music-listening experience.
MOG’s all-you-can-eat, on-demand listening service provides access to a deep library of over 11 million songs and a million albums through its mobile apps on iPhone and Android, as well as on the Web and streaming entertainment devices for TV. It surpasses all other music subscription services in its ease-of-use, discovery features and audio quality.
Jive Software today announced the results of a new study revealing that Social Business is increasingly perceived as a strategic executive imperative in the enterprise. 78% of the executives surveyed recognized that having a social strategy is critical to the future success of their businesses. Read more
We’re feeling the Friday here at the DealmakerMedia office and getting ready for a sunny weekend. In planning for the upcoming summer months, there are a lot of amazing apps that can turn your vacation from ho-hum to wham-bam… or something.
The Next Web has written a report on, “Travel essentials: 10 iPhone apps to take on holiday.” Check out the full article here to read more about each app. Enjoy!
Can you look over my business plan? Can you help me think about funding options? Can you build our website? Can you develop the business concept? Can you intro me to Steve Jobs?
Many of us get overloaded with requests and it’s difficult to just say “no”. When you start feeling like a broken record saying, “No. No. No,” try using one of these ten options to mix it up and soften the blow. If you would rather go another route, try modeling Dave McClure and add a profanity before “no.” Whatever works for ya. Read more
