Seattle Archives - Page 4 of 4

Seattle Based Beamit Receives Funding From Schmidt And Bezos

Seattle-based Beamit, specializes in international money transfers for ordinary people. For the most part, when people wanted to send money to relatives in other countries it often meant spending time in long lines at Wal-Mart or other retail establishments, filling out long forms and waiting for Western Union or Moneygram to take in all the information and then finally the recipient would receive the funds. This was of course, after paying outrageous fees to the service provider.

Beamit’s founder Matt Oppenheimer discovered this pain first hand while overseeing mobile and internet banking at Barclays Bank Kenya.

“Many Kenyans received money in an old and antiquated way using a cash-based system on both ends but it was an expensive and a painful customer experience,” Oppenheimer told Seattle based tech site Geekwire. “I knew that there was the opportunity to leverage digital channels, including mobile phones, to improve the lives of our customers.”

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Seattle Based Urban Spoon Sees Big Growth In Reservations

While OpenTable is still by far the giant in the world of table reservation apps, Seattle based Urban Spoon is making great strides in a territory that once exclusively belonged to OpenTable.

UrbanSpoon has been known since it’s inception for it’s slot machine style interface for serving up great restaurant suggestions. When you open up the Urban Spoon app on your Android or iPhone you shake it and the three bars rotate like a slot machine. They eventually land on a restaurant recommendation.

UrbanSpoon reported to Geekwire that last month they sat one million people using their reservation system. That’s not a lot considering San Francisco based OpenTable claims they’ve sat over 280 million people since coming online in 1999. Opentable also claims to have 25,000 restaurants in their system.

Urban Spoon on the other hand says they have restaurants in the thousands, the San Francisco Chronicle says that Urban Spoon has 4,000 restaurants in it’s network.

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19 Year Olds Make YCombinator Winter Class With Private Family Facebook Style Social Network FamilyLeaf

Two 19 year old entrepreneurs from Bellevue Washington are on their second start up already. Geekwire’s John Cook reports that when he first met them they were working on a gift card startup that was called AvantCard. The teenagers have been friends since grade school.

The friends Wesley Zhao and Ajay Mehta have started something new. Their project, FamilyLeaf, is a closed social network that is similar to Facebook but allows family members to privately share contact information, photos and updates with each other. It’s biggest competitor is the Facebook app Family Builder which was recently purchased by Intelius.

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Seattle Start Up Replyboard Uses Risky (But Hilarious) Hidden Camera Videos To Show Risks On Craigslist

Replyboard founder Steiner Skipsnes has created a website that allows anonymous buyers and sellers to get rated and become trusted without divulging their private information.

Sure we’ve all heard about or seen the movie “The Craigslist Killer” however dealing with strangers in their homes can be dangerous. Meeting strangers in a public place may seem safe but you could still get totally ripped off when that electronic item you just bought doesn’t charge up ever again, or you find out that used cell phone you bought has a stolen ESN.

Overall the replyboard concept is a valuable one.

Skipsnes is bootstrapping it. In fact he is still working a day job to support replyboard right now. So he was looking for a way to show the importance of replyboard on a rather large scale without spending a huge amount of money on marketing. He also wanted to show his users exactly what replyboard was for without cluttering the message.

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Redfin Adds Price Alerts For Home Shoppers

Real Estate start up Redfin just made home shopping a little easier. They’ve added new price alert email notifications via their “Instant updates”. Now instead of waiting for a weekly or daily email, users are notified within 15-30 minutes of any price change to the properties that they are interested in.

Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman, told geekswire.com that in this day in age in real estate timing is everything. He pointed out that 17 percent of listings that debuted on Redfin and then sold, were under contract within three days or less.

“In a world where a Las Vegas chef can now buy a fish caught in the Adriatic before the fisherman has even returned to the harbor, it’s crazy to think that real estate for the most part has run on 1950s-newspaper-time, with one email update in the morning. Instant Updates changes the whole speed of the game.” Kelman told geekswire.com

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