Seattle Archives - Page 3 of 4

Portland Startup Hively Teams Up With TangoCard To Reward Great Customer Service

Last week when we brought you our interview with Hively co-founder Jason Lander, we knew we were going to hear an announcement regarding a partner for customer service rewards. Now we hear about rewards startups all the time and loyalty and rewards programs. Hively is a little different, they’re taking the responsibility for a great customer service interaction back into the providers hands. Quite frankly, the way it should be.

Customer service is the number one driver of loyalty. It’s what turned Sprint around when Dan Hesse took over. It’s why I stayed with T-Mobile for years (not anymore as their customer service slid), it’s why I try to stay at Drury when I can. All of these companies have had superior customer service. In fact, several studies have shown that customers will pay a premium, or maybe a little more for a product or meal from a place where they know they are going to receive great service, than go for a deal with places that have bad customer service.

Customer service and rewards for good customer service are the foundation for Hively.

In our interview Lander told us that they were soon going to unveil a way for customer service people to redeem points from good one click reviews. Now we’ve found out what the customer service people can do with the points. They can get “stuff” from TangoCard’s network of retailers.

Three things happen in the Hively model:

A customer service agent focuses on their quality of service using the incentivized program. This way, even in non commissioned sales environments, agents and sales people can earn something “more”,and it’s not even based on a sale. With the improved customer service the sales will flow in, just ask Sptrint.

A customer service agent/sales rep will encourage customers to use the one click method of rating their service. They obviously want their points and the establishment wants the feedback.

Sales are driven by better customer service.

We love startups that turn an industry on it’s head.

“We believe that the right rewards given at the right time will drive significant and valuable results,” said David Leeds, CEO and founder of Tango Card. “We’re excited to partner with Hively to source and fulfill their program requirement for digital rewards.”

“Hively has always been about gathering and measuring customer happiness,” said Jason Lander, co-founder of Hively. “Since virtual rewards can quickly lose their appeal, our customers have asked for a way to more tangibly recognize colleagues and top performers. Our partnership with Tango Card is the perfect solution.”

Linkage:

Hively is here

TangoCard is Here

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Skip The Grocery Checkout Lines & More With Seattle Startup: Qthru

If you thought the self serve lines at grocery store checkouts were convenient, you ain’t seen nothing yet. A new Seattle startup called Qthru is developing a mobile app system that integrates with a grocery store checkout kiosk to let you scan, pay and go,skipping the traditional checkout line altogether.

The startup’s founder, Aaron Roberts, grew tired of waiting in checkout lines, so he developed an app for that. Qthru allows the user to scan the barcodes of their grocery items with their smartphone creating a “shopping cart” while they go. As the user scans and puts the groceries into their cart, the app keeps a running tally for the total.

Roberts even figured in the necessity of the scale, so at their beta testing store in The Seattle area, they integrated a barcode printer for weighable items.

When the user is finished shopping they scan their phone at a kiosk and then enter their pin into the app which initiates the payment with the card tied to Qthru. A store employee looks over the groceries and the customer is ready to go.

Qthru is being tested at the Snoqualmie IGA store which is owned by Tyler Myers. Myers owns four more IGA store and a hardware store as well.

At first Myers was concerned about theft but quickly found out that with the employee checking through the groceries when the customer leaves, shoplifting is nearly impossible. Myers has been a big proponent of the Qthru system and has even offered Roberts feature ideas for the app.

“There’s a lot to be done with coupon and suggestive selling,” Myers told the Seattle Business Journal

Myers has suggested that Qthru could offer customers suggestions for wines and other things that would compliment the items already in their carts and offer a discount with them. He also suggested that the system could let a customer know if there is a cheaper alternative to the item they just bought, for example if the customer scanned Coke products and it was Pepsi week.

The beta test is near completion and the app is just about ready to upload to the iTunes store. Roberts promises and Android version and Windows Phone version as well.

Linkage:

Checkout Qthru here

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Seattle Startup: MoxTree The Social Network For Moms INTERVIEW

Whether you’re a brand new mom or a veteran mom, you can always use the camaraderie and advice of other likeminded mothers. If you’ve just had your first child and you have a problem or a question it’s great to have experienced moms to help you out. It’s also great to have new moms to buddy up with and go through the goods and the bads of raising children together.

These are the basic principles around connecting moms to each other, and Mox Tree a social network for moms.

The Seattle startup was founded by 33 year old Victoria Oldridge who is the mom to two children under two and a a half. She was attending different mom groups for play dates and book clubs and found that for some reason or another most of these groups don’t stay together. Obviously the internet and a social network just for moms would be a great place to start.

MoxTree is still prelaunch and they have a sign up bar at the top of the page but Oldridge is very optimistic about meeting the general need to connect for moms.

Sure you can meet moms in the neighborhood or at the park,but we’ve all seen at least one episode of Desperate Housewives. Of course school can be a great place to meet other moms, and it can also turn into a competitive war zone.

Using MoxTree mothers can learn more and more about each other while connecting and forming friendships without these other issues in the way.

We got a chance to talk with Oldridge about MoxTree in this interview:

Seattle Startup: iHear Network Is Like Your Own Personal News Radio Station INTERVIEW

A Seattle startup is revolutionizing the way you consume news. The startup is called iHear Network and their first product takes your news, tweets and other information and reads them aloud for you. It’s a text-to-speech app that focuses on the news, information and social items you want to hear.

Their first app launched ahead of SXSW 2011 and was designed to read tweets aloud to you. The Seattle based startup, founded by Matt Fitzsimmons, Matthew Markus and Geoff Simons has gone beyond Twitter to news and information.

We got a chance to talk with iHear Network CEO Paul Simons. Check out the interview below the break.

Denver Startup: Plink Teams Up With Tango Card

Seattle startup TangoCard continues to make news. Just last week we reported that Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, had participated in a $1.8M round of funding for TangoCard through his Innovation Endeavors investment arm.

Today loyalty and rewards startup Plink has announced a partnership with TangoCard that will take their 35,000 merchant rewards network from Facebook credits, to a plethora of great opportunities for redemption. Now in addition to earning Facebook credits that can be used for hundreds of Facebook apps and games, customers in the Plink reward network can also earn credit towards top merchants like Amazon,Home Depot, Target,iTunes,The Gap, Nike and many more.

“Our members have asked for more choices and we’re excited to expand the innovative ways they can earn rewards for eating and shopping offline,” Peter Vogel, Plink’s co-founder and President said in a statement. “Plink’s goal is to bridge the gap between online consumers and their offline purchases and partnering with Tango Card makes that vision more rewarding for our current members and attractive to new ones. We still believe in Facebook and Facebook credits; we wanted to increase our reach and exposure.”

Tango will also handle all of the work involved in the gift card part of the program.

“Plink and Tango Card are rethinking how consumers want to earn and use rewards,” David Leeds, CEO and founder of Tango Card said in a prepared statement. “Tango Card carefully curates digital rewards to deliver a complete program in a card. This approach allows Plink to focus on their core business: creating an innovative online-to-offline loyalty program. We are huge fans of what Plink is doing and are delighted that Plink selected our easy SDK [software development kit] to integrate the Tango Card.”

“We were looking for new ways to advertise all over the Internet and through Facebook, not just to people that are playing games on Facebook,” Vogel added. “We had seen Tango out in the marketplace. They have a lot of the biggest and most popular brands that our members want. Tango Card provides our members with a one-stop stop shop with an easy entry point. Tango also has a mobile application that enables our members to pick the [electronic] card they want on the go. It’s a very appealing model. For us, it’s all about choice.”

Just last week Tango received a $1.8 million dollar series A round. They said at that time they would use the fund for expansion, hiring more developers and expanding their proprietary software applications. Obviously they are moving quickly toward that goal.

Linkage

For more information on Plink visit this link

For more information on TangoCard visit this link

Source: Press Release via Loyalty360

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Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors Backs Seattle Startup Tango Card

Seattle startup Tango Card is looking to continue to bring innovation to the gift card and rewards space. They are focused on enterprise customers and incorporate digital goods into gift cards and loyalty programs. Tango Card already powers solutions for Bing Rewarsd, FedEx, Extole and Shutterfly.

Those are just some of the factors by two big announcements the company had last week. First of which was that Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors has participated in a $1.8 million dollar Series A round, alongside Western Technology Investment. Tango Card plans to use those funds to hire more software developers and expand their proprietary software applications.

Tango Card also announced that Westpac GM Technology and Boeing Joint Strike Fighter IT director Randy Fennel is joining the company in an expanded CTO role.

“As a company we’re focused on launching innovative and proprietary software applications in huge and unexplored verticals, execution, and strong brand and partner curation. With Innovation Endeavors and WTI as our first institutional investors we have access to incredible industry thought leaders, mentors and innovators from the Innovation Community. Both investors also bring very deep pockets and long-term focus to Tango Card,” said David Leeds, CEO and Founder of Tango Card. “Additionally, our ability to attract someone with the pedigree, capabilities, and respect that Randy Fennel brings to the company underscores the exciting things we have already done and the mission we are on. Ultimately, this additional capital and the hire of Randy positions us to scale rapidly – a good thing since we have grown 30X already year-over-year,” Leeds concludes.

“We were attracted to Tango Card’s vision of bringing gift cards and digital goods to huge and unexplored areas, and doing this primarily through efficient and scalable software and proprietary applications,” said Dror Berman, Founding Managing Partner at Innovation Endeavors. “We believe we can add significant value as partners and advisors and look forward to working with this exceptionally talented team.” Maurice Werdegar, CEO of WTI stated, “We love David’s track record of success and clear results-based leadership. I’ve known him since his FiberTower days, just before he and his co-founders took that company public, and we see similar opportunities here.”

Tango Card works like no other gift card program out there. A purchaser can buy a Tango Card and give it to the recipient via email. The recipient can then exchange the value of the card for a variety of retailers cards like Amazon, iTunes, Target etc. Or they can elect to donate all or a portion of the cards value to charity.

Not only that but Tango Card makes their card program more social. They call it the “What I got” card, and they allow the recipient to take a picture of what they got with the card and post it for the giver to see via a mobile app available for both Android and iOS.

Tango Card allows more variety for the recipient and a better chance they’ll get what they actually want, no matter what the retailer.

Linkage

Find out more about Tango Card here

Check out the Tango Card app for Android here

Check out the Tango Card app for iPhone here

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Seattle Startup Doxo Launches One Click Bill Payment For Mobile

Doxo, the Seattle based all in one digital file cabinet and e-payment startup has launched a new one click payment method for bill paying and to top it off, it’s available on mobile as well.

Although Crunchbase has Doxo formed in 2008, the company launched the Doxo platform in mid 2011. Their all in one service allows users to manage all types of bills from one simple easy to use platform. Now you don’t have to bookmark 5 different credit card sites, all your utility sites and your car note. Everything is managed by logging into Doxo.

Doxo and their all in one digital file cabinet and e-pay system is backed by the king of all e-commerce, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, through his investment arm. In addition to their consumer customers, Doxo has attracted government clients in Washington including: Benton County, Chelan County, Clallam County, Clark County, Franklin County, Island County, Lincoln County, Pend Oreille County, Spokane County, Stevens County, Thurston County, Walla Walla County, Clallam County Public Utilities, Mukilteo Water and Sewer District, Lake Stevens Utility District.

Doxo launched an iOS app last summer and just recently updated it. They also just released an Android app available in the Google Play store, both mobile apps allow consumer users to pay their bills using a one-click method on their mobile phones.

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Seattle: TechCocktail Is Coming To You May 23rd

Next Wednesday as a lot of eyes are on Pier 94 in New York City for TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, the west coast attention will turn to Seattle. Seattle’s startup scene will come alive at the Pink Ultra Lounge.

TechCocktail mixers are known for their excellent networking, casual startup pitches and libations. I mean how could you have a media conglomerate known as TechCocktail without libations.

TechCocktail hasn’t posted the startups yet but we’ll be watching out for that, and you can too just visit this page at TechCocktail.

There’s about two days left in the general ticket sales for $15.00 but then they only go up $5.00. Tech Cocktail is also having an event in Washington DC the next day, so if you’re on the east coast you can head over here for more info on the DC event which will feature Startup America CEO Scott Case and startup evangelist, Georgetown Professor and author, Rohit Bhargava.

TechCocktails recent Baltimore event was a huge success they had 13 startups competing in their startup throw down.

If you’re ready to strut your stuff at TechCocktails Seattle mixer head over here and get registered. If you’re in the other Washington (DC that is) head over here.

Portland Startup: Churchkey Can Company Gets Tech Investors For Their Nostalgic Beer

This isn’t the first time that tech investors have backed a food and beverage startup. Tech Investors came out in droves to back Jonathan Kaplan, the creator/founder of the Flip video camera with his chain of grilled cheese restaurants called “The Melt”.

Entourage star Adrian Grenier and former Nike designer, Justin Hawkins have teamed up to found the Churchkey Can Company. Churchkey makes what’s being dubbed a “Pacific Northwest brewed Pilsner style craft beer”, however it’s not the beer itself that has everybody talking, but rather the can it’s packaged in. Churchkey Can Company is putting their beer into a flat topped churchkey opening can.

Before pull back lids you may remember having a can opener in the house that had a diamond shaped end on it. You would puncture the soup can on both sides and pour the soup our of one of the triangle shaped openings. The opposite opening made sure that the soup poured out smoothly. That’s the same idea behind Churchkey Can Company’s flat can. A style of beer can that dates back to the 1930’s.

ChurchKey Can Company’s flat top steel cans are made out of all recycled steel. Grenier and Hawkins turned to the Ball can company to manufacture the cans for them. According to some, the flat top can and the church key opening actually locks in the freshness.

“It’s about the joy of drinking good beer – from the people you drink it with, to where you drink it, and with this unique package, how you open it,” said Justin Hawkins, Churchkey’s co-founder and creative director. “We didn’t make these traditions, but are keeping them alive with Churchkey.”

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Seattle Startup: Joey Bra, A Bra For Holding Cell Phones, IDs And More

Whether you want to admit to it or not, or whether you think it’s classy or not, we all know someone or maybe you are that someone, who when you need to hold something fit for a pocket and have a nice skirt on or no pocket yoga pants, you’ve resorted to putting it in your bra. Maybe it was a little cash, maybe your drivers license or credit card, perhaps your cell phone. Well now there’s bras made specifically for that. It’s called the Joey Bra.

Mariah Gentry and Kyle Barlow are the co-founders of Joey Bra. These innovative bras include pockets that align with the side of the body capable of holding your cell phone, some cash, maybe your IDs, and they do it without drawing attention to the bra itself.

Geekwire’s Rebecca Lowell was one of 200 judges at the UW business plan competition. She stumbled upon this innovative new startup the moment she walked through the door. She took notice to the model wearing nothing but a bra up top, a Joey Bra.

This isn’t some gimmicky idea. Gentry is a NASA Space grant student with a double major in entrepreneurship and environmental science. She also was a finalist in the Wells Fargo Case Competition. She met co-founder Barlow at UW’s Foster School of Business.

The duo is targeting college students and offers two models a strapless version and an 8 way convertible strap version. Lowell reported that her only concern was the access to the items in the compartments and moisture as the result of perspiration. No worries as one of the co-founders works at REI and they’ve already been sourcing water proof materials.

Linkage:

Source: Geekwire

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Seattle: Google Backed CleanTech Startup AltaRock To Start Drilling In Oregon

In 2008 Google invested in a new CleanTech startup called AltaRock. AltaRock plans on building engineered geothermal systems in places where natural resources aren’t already available for such systems. AltaRock will create geothermal reservoirs in areas without natural flowing streams.

AltaRock had embarked on a demonstration project of this technology in California in 2007 however the project ran into technical difficulties and ended in 2009. AltaRock applied to work on a similar project in Oregon in May of 2010 which was just recently approved. Oregon’s Bureau of Land Management said they find no big environmental impact to the project.

For this project to work AltaRock needs to use special tools to drill wells that are a few miles deep. They will then inject cold water to fracture hot rocks. Electricity is produced by pumping water into the well where it will “flow along fissures of hot rocks and extend them” reports GigaOm. AltraRock needs to predict the paths of the expanded fissures to insure the production wells will intercept them. Each well typically costs a few million dollars. For the Oregon site AltaRock needs to build two new wells which they will use in conjunction with a well that’s 10,060 feet deep and already in place. The existing well will be used for injecting the water while the two new wells will be used to pump out the hot water.

AltaRock raised $26 million dollars earlier on in a round led by Google Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures and Vulcan Capital. They have also received a $21.4 million dollar grant from the U.S. Department of Energy.

An MIT study has said that the enhanced geothermal system could create 100gw of electricity by 2050.

Source: GigaOM

Microryza: Crowdfunding for scientific research with only one prize: learning

Seattle, Washington: Microryza is tackling the lack of funding for scientific research using “crowdfunding.” Thinking differently regarding what should drive the bidding and decided to not follow along the lines of Kickstarter with prizes or exclusives, instead the offer the gift of learning. In the companies FAQ they explain the decision to forgo the prizes,

Other crowdfunding websites provide tangible returns. Why doesn’t Microryza researchers provide tangible rewards?

We believe the real value is in the process, regardless of whether or not you meet your project aims. While providing donors with tangible rewards is good at getting funding, we don’t want you to be held liable if you don’t achieve your promised rewards.We understand that sometimes, your research project just doesn’t go as expected. That’s alright, because that is just the nature of research. If you knew things what to expect, then you wouldn’t be doing anything new.

Co-founder Denny Luan states, “what matters is the process, not the results,” says Luan “You can’t really offer things like ‘I will name a newly discovered butterfly species after you’” in the hope that you can deliver that if you get funded.

I am going to borrow a paragraph from the website Insidehighered, due to both their outstanding story and the fact that they’ve followed the progress of Microryza for some time now.

There’s a strong social component to the startup that Luan is building with Microryza – it’s not just a place for funding, but a place for networking and sharing research. In fact, Luan describes Microryza as a “social learning” site, and he’s clear that while the goal is certainly to have scientific research projects funded, the emphasis isn’t just on the outcomes of that research. It’s on the process itself.

What is the cost for either donor or researcher? “We take a small transaction fee for all successfully funded projects, which is 10%. This includes the 3% processing fee we have to pay for payment processing.For details on how the payment processing fee is calculated, please view Stripe’s pricing. If your project does not meet its goal, we won’t charge to you or your donors.” Are donations tax-deductible? They will be soon! We’re currently working on channeling your donations directly to the researcher’s host institution so that you can receive a tax receipt from the Institution’s respective 501(3)c entity. Stay tuned for more info.

The overall design of the site is very attractive yet is also usable. There are currently only 8 projects up on the site and they are cycled through in the top three slots highlighting the projects.

Each project is given space to include a brief introduction of the project, researcher, and includes a place to include any relevant publications or papers they’ve contributed on. The researcher is then asked a number of questions some of which are more generic as seen below and others are more targeted to their project:

So what is your project all about?
What inspired you to pursue this idea?
So this project challenges (this or that idea or problem)
Why does this project matter to you?
How do you define success?
What do you plan to share with your backers?
What’s the risk associated with a project like this?
If you could tell your backers any one thing, what would it be? Seriously, anything.
And what does this project depend on in order to be successful?
What are the next steps for this project?
What if it succeeds?

Some of the Denny Luan quotes are from this article over at insidehighered UNFORTUNATELY, I did not manage to note who the original source was for this story, I saw it in our Google+ Stream

Seattle Daily Deals Site Tippr Gets Proactive; Refunds Customers For Possible Fake Bose Headphone Purchase

Every daily deals site’s worst nightmare recently came true for Seattle-based Tippr, however their handling of the situation saved face and customers.

One of Tippr’s merchants recently ran a deal for a pair of Bose headphones at the low-cost of $49. The merchant had said that the headsets were genuine and that they were authorized to sell them. However as Tippr CEO Martin Tobias told Geekwire they started to have their doubts and then worked with Bose directly to vet the validity of this deal.

“Upon further investigation and in partnership with Bose Corporation, we were unable to verify the merchant’s inventory levels nor the authenticity of the product to our satisfaction,” Tobias tells GeekWire in an email. ”There are apparently quite good fake versions of these headphones in the market and we were concerned that the merchant may have been attempting to ship knock-offs instead of factory authorized product. So out of a preponderance of caution, and looking out for the interest of our Tippr customers, we decided to refund all customer’s money rather than risk them getting a potentially faulty or poor quality product.”

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Seattle Based Startup Wavii: Finally An Easy To Use News Feed

When you look at Facebook you see the latest news from all your friends carefully curated over time and managed by your friends. Your friends post what they want you to see and you can keep up with them. It’s really great when you think about it.

I connected over the weekend with a friend that I hadn’t seen in person in over a decade. We had been friends on Facebook for two years and we were both pretty caught up on the small talk when we met up. Imagine if something as simplistic as your Facebook feed could be utilized for the news that you get off your RSS reader.

We’ve looked at a lot of news aggregation programs and Wavii, a Seattle-based startup may be the easiest to absorb to date. You login to Wavii via your Facebook account and it immediately populates sources that the system thinks may be of interest to you. You can then click on those sources to add them to your feed.

In about five minutes I created a Wavii feed based on articles I need to keep up with for Nibletz. Naturally every other news reader I’ve got has Android stories and I’ve been looking for something more effective than Google Alerts. I created my account with Facebook and was quickly adding topics that interested me like, Venture Beat, TechCrunch and even Anderssen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Greylock Partners, yes Wavii allows you to get that specific.

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